2020 Democratic presidential primary

debating candidates' histories and positions is not "discord," it is the process

if someone else had disseminated the Harris videos, it wouldn't change any of the substance

you have to be super deep in beltway gossip realpolitik hell to not realize why people want to support candidates they agree with and are less enthused about--for instance--a prosecutor

I get why leftists hate cops. I mean, I am a leftist that hates cops!

esp the SFPD ugh those assholes

what irritates me is the following equation, which is well in evidence around here already:

1) I hate cops
2) ergo I do not like this cop that is running for president
3) thus it is cool if I throw up any old bullshit that damages said cop running for president, regardless of its relevance, accuracy or veracity

it's step number 3 that is the problem

I’ll vote for the democrat in november always but until then I’m not going to think about strategizing. Nobody is able to talk about social issues outside the lens of this weird partisan lens. It’s like everyone is james carville now.

laughing about throwing parents in jail over truancy not nec "any old bullshit"

Oh i didn’t see 3. I saw people saying they didn’t trust her on healthcare bc, even though its good she supports m4a, there are things in her background that suggest it wouldn’t be a priority for her the way it would for a warren or a bernie.

BUT im at work and not reading the thread carefully

I saw people saying they didn’t trust her on healthcare bc, even though its good she supports m4a, there are things in her background that suggest it wouldn’t be a priority for her the way it would for a warren or a bernie.

see? this is literal bullshit

laughing about throwing parents in jail over truancy not nec "any old bullshit"

actually yes, this is also bullshit. show me the parents she threw in jail.

Why? Fighting economic inequality hasn’t been her passion. There are candidates in the ring for whom it has

I dont know about the truancy law thing—im not speaking to that

because she literally co-sponsored a M4A bill WITH BERNIE, which I have linked two twice already now

Fighting economic inequality hasn’t been her passion.

just... waht

As attorney general, Harris made waves in 2011 after pulling California out of national negotiations pursuing a monetary settlement from major banks for foreclosed households during the financial crisis. She believed she could do better for her state.

In her new book, "The Truths We Hold," the senator recounts a tense phone conversation with J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, persuading him to provide more settlement money. The two yelled at each other "like dogs in a fight," she wrote. A spokesperson from J.P. Morgan declined to comment on the conversation.

Harris later reached a $25 billion settlement deal from J.P. Morgan and other banks, much higher than the $2 billion to $4 billion initially on the table. California homeowners received over $18 billion in mortgage relief as a result of the deal, according to a report by the attorney general's office.

"This outcome is the result of an insistence that California receive a fair deal commensurate with the harm done here," Harris said in a statement at the time.

Harris later backed the California Homeowners Bill of Rights, a package of legislation to protect homeowners during the foreclosure process. The legislation also extended the statute of limitations to prosecute mortgage fraud from 1 to 3 years.

In 2017, her first year as a U.S. senator, she introduced a bill alongside fellow Democrats Elizabeth Warren and Dianne Feinstein targeting executives at big banks. The bill, entitled the "Accountability for Wall Street Executives Act," would allow state law enforcement to issue subpoenas when investigating bank fraud.

yeah what fucking ever

It's time to get over the hangover of George McGovern. pic.twitter.com/Cl6T47BAgV

— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) January 29, 2019

"less because of substance than the style"

yeah whatever gtfo, clearly Harris' problem is with STYLE rmde

this is so tiresome, the endless stream of nonsense that's easily rebuttable, what does it remind me of hmmm

I didn’t actually know about the 25 bn settlement.

that guy looks at Kamala Harris and sees George McGovern, sounds reasonable

yeah well I live in California
xp

Is she actually as left as warren and bernie on economics? What kind of marginal tax rates does she want? What about free college? Maybe i totally misunderstood who she is

I’m wrong a lot, it’s fine. For clarity though i never said she was paul ryan, i just thought there were other more economicallt left wing candidates in the running so its not surprising many would be resistant to harris

nonsense that's easily rebuttable, what does it remind me of hmmm

Clinton saying that Nancy Reagan was an AIDS activist?

What kind of marginal tax rates does she want?

she recently said AOC's proposed rate is a good idea. I don't think she's put out a tax plan yet the way Warren has.

that guy looks at Kamala Harris and sees George McGovern, sounds reasonable

I fear you have misunderstood -- he's saying she sees McGovern in everyone to the left of her

i don't think it's necessarily a bad thing that M4A is just taking the place of "universal health care" which tells you less about how it will be achieved or exactly how it will work. M4A implies the extension to everyone of a program people already know, that already exists and works just fine, that they see paying for their parents' care. for now, its power is precisely in its simplicity.

but yes, the specifics of that extension will matter and should be hashed out at some point. disclaimer up front i know nothing about health care policy or how anything works. but from my five minutes of laser-focused googling, it's easy to imagine the ratio of how much medicare covers, or the extent of covered services, getting tinkered with. you don't need the details of "what exactly will the insurance industry look like" in the stump speech, because 95% of the people who are getting motivated by "M4A" do not care.... but if i'm choosing between candidates in a primary, "what kind of coverage are we talking about?" is meaningful. the fate-of-the-insurance industry stuff is really like side effects of this. as a leftie i want to project true universal coverage onto M4A, but there is certainly wiggle room for a range of M4As.

like e.g. "radical" version is where M4A is a trojan horse for extending true universal coverage: everybody's fully covered in terms of costs and in terms of services you can get. that most clearly fits the concept of quality health care as a right, and would appear to leave almost no room for a private health insurance industry. you wouldn't need to ban it - it would have no competitive products worth buying.

"progressive" versions might begin with extending current "medicare" to everybody, but maintaining only its current degree of covered services and money paid out, and range up to anything short of the "radical" version above. this is where we get into wonkish weeds but it matters - there's a big difference in terms of efficacy and equity between a scheme where the platter of covered services resembles a pretty decent employer group plan today, and one where it resembles a pretty crappy employer group plan today. those differences also test the depth of the committment to quality health care being a right, and suggest how big a space remains for the private insurance market in terms of non-covered services or costs for which they'll pick up the slack. i imagine there's some breaking point where once the plan gets more ambitious in its coverage than X, you can no longer plausibly say "look, there will always be companies competing to offer you hospital beds with HBO on-demand and organic catered meals." of course, it may be that nobody cares anyway - it's not like the health insurance industry is super popular.

a "centrist" or "conservative" version might extend "medicare" to everybody but shrink the range of covered services and the amount of money paid out for them, either to reduce costs because the politician is in the pocket of rich people who don't want to pay taxes, or to protect the insurance industry because the politician in is in the pocket of the insurance industry. you can easily imagine schemes where, e.g., there are medicare "tiers" depending on your age or something, so that medicare pays 50% of covered costs for 65 and older, but only 30% for 55 and older, 25% below that, or whatever. or the number of people covered increases but the range of services covered shrinks. it could still be a monumental shift in american health care policy and change/save millions of lives, but it posits a less fundamental and liberating shift in our way of life, and much less cost savings for the individual. it's also much easier to imagine such a scheme being eroded by future conservative governments: "of course we believe in medicare for all, but costs are out of control and we have to tighten our belts" --- harder to pull off if "medicare for all" were synonymous with true universal coverage. so such a package is not hardly as much to get excited about and march in the streets for, but plausibly what we might end up with depending on the composition of congress, and the platform/rhetoric of the party leaders including the presidential candidate.

Harris supports debt-free college and noted so in her announcement speech. Here's a previous proposal from 2016: https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article102937257.html

xp

Regardless of its applicability to Harris, I think that's a good critique of the Democratic establishment. (The Corey Robin post.)

that proposal actually slightly more aggressive than similar Bernie bill (which she also cosponsored): https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/04/04/sanders-democratic-colleagues-introduce-new-free-college-bill

I think that's a good critique of the Democratic establishment.

in general yes I agree but a) the establishment is p weak and v much in flux right now and b) Harris is not that establishment

like, the Dem establishment that's wary of going too far left are not in California, they are old guard dudes (it's usually dudes) in the mid-west

and Schumer etc

actually Feinstein is p old establishment Dem tbh, can't wait to get rid of her

here's some substance for you

Time after time, when progressives urged her to embrace criminal justice reforms as a district attorney and then the state’s attorney general, Ms. Harris opposed them or stayed silent. Most troubling, Ms. Harris fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors.

Consider her record as San Francisco’s district attorney from 2004 to 2011. Ms. Harris was criticized in 2010 for withholding information about a police laboratory technician who had been accused of “intentionally sabotaging” her work and stealing drugs from the lab. After a memo surfaced showing that Ms. Harris’s deputies knew about the technician’s wrongdoing and recent conviction, but failed to alert defense lawyers, a judge condemned Ms. Harris’s indifference to the systemic violation of the defendants’ constitutional rights.

Ms. Harris contested the ruling by arguing that the judge, whose husband was a defense attorney and had spoken publicly about the importance of disclosing evidence, had a conflict of interest. Ms. Harris lost. More than 600 cases handled by the corrupt technician were dismissed....

Ms. Harris was similarly regressive as the state’s attorney general. When a federal judge in Orange County ruled that the death penalty was unconstitutional in 2014, Ms. Harris appealed. In a public statement, she made the bizarre argument that the decision “undermines important protections that our courts provide to defendants.” (The approximately 740 men and women awaiting execution in California might disagree)....

Worst of all, though, is Ms. Harris’s record in wrongful conviction cases. Consider George Gage, an electrician with no criminal record who was charged in 1999 with sexually abusing his stepdaughter, who reported the allegations years later. The case largely hinged on the stepdaughter’s testimony and Mr. Gage was convicted.

Afterward, the judge discovered that the prosecutor had unlawfully held back potentially exculpatory evidence, including medical reports indicating that the stepdaughter had been repeatedly untruthful with law enforcement. Her mother even described her as “a pathological liar” who “lives her lies.”

In 2015, when the case reached the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, Ms. Harris’s prosecutors defended the conviction. They pointed out that Mr. Gage, while forced to act as his own lawyer, had not properly raised the legal issue in the lower court, as the law required.

The appellate judges acknowledged this impediment and sent the case to mediation, a clear signal for Ms. Harris to dismiss the case. When she refused to budge, the court upheld the conviction on that technicality. Mr. Gage is still in prison serving a 70-year sentence.

That case is not an outlier....

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/opinion/kamala-harris-criminal-justice.html

oh cool now you're reposting an opinion piece we argued about two weeks ago

that guy looks at Kamala Harris and sees George McGovern, sounds reasonable

― Οὖτις, Thursday, January 31, 2019 6:48 PM (nineteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i love you but i have real questions about your reading comprehension some days man

all I meant by that post was that McGovern's case is not relevant to Harris, sorry for not being clear

i log off sometimes, dude, y'all should post less

Two whole weeks ago, you're never allowed to discuss the topic again

i wish the kamala defenders itt would engage with the substance of her record instead of fighting with the messenger

? So far I've posted a shit ton about her record in Congress and as AG

I do find the parsing of her legal career mostly disingenuous and irrelevant to a presidential candidacy. Like in the sexual abuse case above, we're all gonna second-guess that conviction based on evidence provided in an opinion piece? yeah ok

I am posting so much because the river of nonsense keeps flowing and also I am stuck listening to a webinar thing all day

What’s the substance on the police department crime lab allegation? The tech was stealing cocaine, worked for the pd, and ?

the substance is that as DA she knew about it and didn't tell the defense about it (or drop the cases, I guess)

how that's relevant to being president, I have no idea

(very Law and Order sidebar voice) speaks to character

I remember that case, it was a big deal at the time. I'm fine with those convictions being tossed, but get why a DA would still go after them. shrug

The prosecutor’s duty is to disclose to defense evidence that “tends to negate the guilt of the accused, mitigate the offense, or mitigate the sentence...” Does skimming coke fit?