Democratic (Party) Direction

lol

wow what a horrible post

wow, I'll admit to trolling a bit by posting this stupid article, but wasn't expecting the ugliness on this thread to crank to the max so quickly.

how is this useless fuck not permabanned

c_k = larry appleton = in permanent furious personal-attack mode

Ehhh, sorry DJP, I apologize for the personal shit.

Yeah I am furious, because it's fucked up what happens out there in the world. Maybe I should chill out.

When I did an internship in law school, I represented a black kid who had a fucked life. Mom had just died, never knew his dad, grew up in poverty, and he was being taken care of by his space cadet aunt. My supervisor said he was a lost cause, so that's why he was giving me the case for practice.

He was slated for a two year sentence in a juvenile prison hell where 34% of the kids get violently raped. And that's what they know about!

Through hard work I was able to get him into a group home, this "hopeless case". My supervisor was going to let this kid drown, and the state, at that point, could've given a rat's ass if this kid got brutalized. When we won, my supervisor was pissed off. He wasn't happy, he was annoyed! And it was his job to defend his clients.

Why is any of this OK? Why is this normal? I think people should be more furious with what goes down here!

tearful account of personal heroism, right on cue

rmde

get some goddamned help and stop posting here plz

You dudes are a bunch of ghouls, I think that's the problem here. Normal people generally have no problem whatsoever with my viewpoints, because they're humane! Cripes.

Yeah, I will stop posting.

Do you normally roll up on people you know one or two factoids about and make wholly spurious assumptions about their character or do you just do that to middle-class black people?

Humane, normal people don't draw from this well of self-pity.

Or at least they don't weaponize it for use against others.

Sorry again, DJP, that was my own personal bitterness coming out there.

The point I was trying to make is that the status quo you're all supporting here is what leads to countless, unnecessary tragedies. And the leftists you're critiquing are at least trying to improve circumstances for people, to correct some of these god awful injustices. These are real people, real human lives. It's no joke to me.

Maybe I get a little too passionate about it because of my own personal experiences, but that doesn't make it any less real in the world.

Are you, like, missing the several dozen posts in which people defend this or that politician from charges of impurity?

this is a running monologue, it's like the rest of us aren't even here. which is why it is so goddamned annoying.

What's sad is that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders both ran on ending mass incarceration, and I don't feel like anybody noticed that then or remembers it now.

I mean, I get it, not that federal prison is anything like the biggest part of the picture. But I feel like "there's too many people in jail who don't need to be, and that burden falls predominantly on non-white people" is straight-down-the-middle Democratic politics adhered to by the whole party.

They talk a good talk, but how can you trust them?

http://freebeacon.com/politics/hillary-clinton-private-prison-hypocrisy/

I'll say something nice about a Dem today: it was refreshing to see Tom Perez come out to publicly support Nissan's workers in their unionization fight.

polls mean nothing anymore, but ... Dems over GOP by 14 in generic matchup.

hey c_k if you can't do as you promised and stop posting, a mod will do it for you. there's no point in waiting for you to get 51'd since that already happened to your previous alias

uh can someone tell me what this tweet is in reference to:

I find it disgusting that Bernie Sanders allows his fans to slutshame Kamala Harris when he himself has an out of wedlock child. Hypocrite.

— Bravenak Reclaimed (@bravenak) August 3, 2017

no earthly idea

it's about Bernie Sanders being a total slut

hotttt

I'm already tired of the 2020 primary

i'll vote for whoever vows to dismantle twitter

at the risk of coming across kaiser-y I don't get what's dumb about the Cooper piece either tbh

I've never liked Booker, don't really care about Patrick, but Harris is like my people so I'm kinda annoyed by the weak sauce getting thrown at her

I feel like the "seriousness" of charges thrown against her in that article are on a par with people holding Bernie's pro-NRA votes against him, ie largely immaterial and not reflective of broader policy priorities

and the fact that the article neatly elides mentioning that all three candidates just happen to be black is very O I SEE WHAT U DID THERE

The sum total of the cases against Booker and Patrick are invoking the name "Bain Capital" and the case against Harris doesn't actually mention the main thing people are currently pillorying her for, then says these are "substantive reasons" and moves on to some self-congratulatory game theory. There's no indication that the person who wrote it even spent five seconds looking into any of these people's records, where you can find more tangible things to write about than "overpromises" and "Bain Capital". It is a completely facile, shallow take on what problems these three might have in presenting themselves as progressive; I've seen editorials in high school newspapers that were better researched and argued.

I guess the last two paragraphs get defensive on that point but still

xp

Copper implying that the Islamophobic attacks against Ellison were way more widespread than they were is pretty sleazy. He's implicitly accusing sone of the very people who denounced it as perpetuating it.

It also says this in @ryanlcooper's piece, but it is not true. @neeratanden and others defended Keith Ellison. https://t.co/D64gHAfcCC pic.twitter.com/fghcG14wKc

— Zachary Fedell 🌐 (@zatchry) August 3, 2017

The Patrick bit is particularly galling because literally 10 seconds of research reveals a pattern of Patrick spending his professional career going into shitty situations at shitty corporations and attempting to bring some measure of accountability to the corporation. That has been the cornerstone hallmark of his career. It also completely ignores that his job at Bain is to build a fund off of investing in companies who produce a tangible social good to their communities as well as a profit. What he is doing is nothing like Romney's role as a business liquidator and it's fundamentally dishonest to elide the two by saying "and worst of all, Deval Patrick WORKS AT BAIN".

In summation, get a better source than The Week, which is weak.

yeah a lot of this is guilt-by-association shit

full confession: part of my eye-rolling at this kind of thing is that I really don't give a fuck about the "donor class". There's really very little legislative quid-pro-quo that anyone can point to when it comes to the kind of campaign donors that this refers to. And what's more, some of these billionaires (Steyer, Soros, etc.) actually do a lot of good with their money. And the greatest liberal Presidents we've ever had were knee-deep in that shit (FDR, LBJ etc.), I just don't accept this kind of simplified view that money = bad policy, because it isn't borne out by the legislative record.

(That being said, I am fully supportive of getting rid of Citizens United, publicy funded campaigned, campaign finance reform, whatever you want to propose - but we don't have it and this is the system we're currently in, so we might as well make it work)

yeah a lot of this is guilt-by-association shit

You mean like 'lefty' Dems who washed their hands of Sanders bcz of nasty TwitterBros?

sure

if you wanna consider twitter trolls and Dem donors equivalent classes of people

(reminder that I am not Fred B and never really had a problem w Sanders beyond thinking he couldn't win in the general and had some rhetorical/political blindspots)

If I washed my hands of someone just because lots of their fans were obnoxious bros I wouldn't still love Pavement as much as I do

This notion that the donor class has absolutely no effect on policy is ludicrous to me. banks and major corporations throw their money at people out of the goodness of their hearts, or out of some vague notion of "stability" or something? legislation that is not proposed, wording that is not used, is just as important as legislation that is. Didn't a leaked memo note that donors were uneasy w/ Warren's rhetoric?

I'm pleased this thread has returned to its usual inanity.

yr welcome Alfred

Ah, there's what I was thinking of

This notion that the donor class has absolutely no effect on policy is ludicrous to me.

I didn't say this. I said there is rarely a direct quid-pro-quo - which is what a lot of these criticisms of candidates usually amount to (ie, "They received a donation, therefore they are going to pass whatever legislation their donors want!") - primarily because legislation is so complex and there are multiple centers of powers/interests involved.

This notion that the donor class has absolutely no effect on policy is ludicrous to me. banks and major corporations throw their money at people out of the goodness of their hearts, or out of some vague notion of "stability" or something? legislation that is not proposed, wording that is not used, is just as important as legislation that is. Didn't a leaked memo note that donors were uneasy w/ Warren's rhetoric?

If you ask the extreme libertarians, they'll tell you that the "donor class" isn't buying legislative preferences, they're paying protection money/being shaken down by the government. Yes, it's as stupid as it sounds.