2020 Democratic presidential primary

Yeah, it took me a few minutes to recognize that asshole who would shoplift from the store I used to work at.

well, Barnicle shoplifted words.

He stole cigars from the tobacco shop I worked at

srsly?

who among us!

any candidates arguing that McCain was NOT a hero? scratch Bernie

McCain was a piece of shit who should have been buried head down so he'd go to hell faster, but that's not a winning opinion.

Things are heating up

cory booker (overgrown chrome dome) wants your kids to die in foreign theaters but rosario dawson was in daredevil so evens out

— Mike Gravel (@MikeGravel) March 21, 2019

"overgrown chrome dome"!

any candidates arguing that McCain was NOT a hero? scratch Bernie

McCain was a piece of shit who should have been buried head down so he'd go to hell faster, but that's not a winning opinion.

He can be two things. If you accept the premise of a war hero as a concept that can exist, then riding out his solitary camp confinement presumably counts in context. Every piece of shit thing he did in getting his position, in entering the war, in bombing during the war, in campaigning for carpet bombing over and over and over again after his release, every policy he pushed, every wife he abused or abandoned... These things might, on any moral scale, outweigh the worth of his taking the imprisonment, but they don't make it not have happened.

any candidate statements on the Israel move?

any candidates arguing that McCain was NOT a hero? scratch Bernie

yes if you count the teens running the Gravel account

lol is Gravel running? no idea

his position is that he's trying to get on a debate stage and push candidates to the left via the medium of having #teens shitpost on his behalf on twitter iirc

which is extremely good and should be supported 100% imo

Asked if he had a chance of winning, Gavel said, 'Oh God, no'

he's 88 years old

I think the party is actually doing a pretty good job of moving to the left on its own. This Gravel thing is funny and fine as long as it's restricted to Twitter. I can't imagine him actually earning a spot on a national debate stage and personally I'm totally OK with that. Not everything has to be for the lulz. And that's not to say he or whoever is running his account isn't raising valid points about the other candidates, but so far it just feels like a lot of bomb throwing.

I really hope he's invited to the debates again.

I don't watch Morning Joe often, but that Buttigieg interview felt weird--like there was no pushback at all on any of his answers. I'm not sure if it was because he's not well known, or because he was dropping the right code words (bipartisan, bipartisan, bipartisan) or because his status as a veteran put him on the right side of the current Trump vs. dead soldier narrative. He seems to swim pretty easily in establishment waters. Not really a criticism.

but so far it just feels like a lot of bomb throwing.

https://i.imgur.com/23zHCNF.jpg

to me it feels like the politics equivalent of the Steak-Umms account but maybe it's more fun if you follow sincere political accounts?

the fucking ego on this Starbucks guy, just now: "I will bring dignity back to the american people."

shut up already, nobody's asking you, what don't you get about this

v cool and good stuff from uncle joe

https://preview.redd.it/ha6rr3xsnin21.jpg?width=507&auto=webp&s=629f9b91bb0acba47120bc34be395e887df4b198

I think Buttigieg did amazing at that interview but during the debates he needs to say less because the real average joe doesn't have the attention span to process that much information.

DSA has endorsed Sanders

http://inthesetimes.com/article/21803/inside-the-democratic-socialists-of-americas-big-decision-to-endorse-bernie

game changer

ha, not a huge surprise, but it's a few dozen thousand more volunteer boots on the ground.

well except for all the chapters disgruntled about it

maybe we'll see a splintering in the usual left fashion (i almost wrote "faction"!)

well except for all the chapters disgruntled about it

hence my hedge of "a few dozen thousand" and not "60k"

apparently Bernie has hedged on reparations

disqualifying

Paul Krugman's NYT column today warned in the title of a "purity test" on medical coverage.

my insurance covers purity tests, but I'm in a union

join or die iirc

the reparations thing is so dumb. not the idea behind reparations, of course, but the idea that there is a single answer to this enormously complex question and that those who don't voice that "correct" answer are to shunned.

*to be

🤔

fwiw i think buttigieg's answer on reparations might be better than sanders's, although the former doesn't fit too easily into a soundbite. he basically said that he hasn't yet seen a proposal for a kind of "cash transfer" (literal or more figurative) that would be seen as "fair" by enough stakeholders (including those who might receive the transfers) to move forward, but that he was open to the idea in a general sense.

what's a good read on various proposals for reparations to victims of the holocaust, and how they have been managed? i'd be curious about the history of that.

here's something on reparations paid by france to french jews deported to death camps (and sometimes their spouses or heirs):

https://www.npr.org/2019/02/07/692376994/holocaust-survivors-and-victims-families-receive-millions-in-reparations-from-fr

i mean, it's hard to argue with this -- each victim is getting the equiv. of $400,000. i can see someone viewing this sort of thing as necessary but not sufficient in terms of how to deal with the legacy of something so horrific.

but it also seems so arbitrary. why these particular victims and their families? what about the many millions of others? what about those that have left no legacy, because their entire families were wiped out? what can be done about the cultures and societies destroyed?

Ta-Nehisi Coates on the case for reparations:

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/ta-nehisi-coates-race-politics-2020-elections.html

I am enough behind reparations, cash and real estate equivalents for individuals, communities and specific organizations, that the single answer is to say "yes, I am for reparations." I don't need the operating procedure manual right now.

xpost

thanks for the coates interview!

there are some weird legalistics w/ the french reparations to. they are basically out of court settlements in which the victims and their descendants give up the right to sue. which is something i always find very weird even in much more mundance circumstances, but in this moral context seems extremely dubious.

*too

There is a non-trivial difference between "I broadly agree with this principle but I haven't seen a reasonable implementation proposal; this issue should be studied so one can be generated" and "despite everything we know about the history of our country and how previous iterations of these programs have excluded black people, if we implement mine we will definitely help black people this time who btw are all poor"

not on the topic of reparations at large, i thought warren's proposal for aid to low-income non-homeowners living in formerly red-lined districts was *interesting* if by no means a comprehensive form of redress. curious what that looks like to people who've studied possible solutions more than i have. but kind of amazing that a major national political figure who is white is talking about the need to do something about the wealth gap created by a specific not-that-long-ago policy. hard to imagine without the work of coates and others to really hammer this home in recent years.

not to say this has all sunk in with everybody it should. i saw a talk last night by a well-intentioned liberal urban planning professor from harvard, who described boston as a "thriving city, but with pockets of deep poverty" in front of a slide full of statistics that, on their face, seemed to suggest an apartheid city, but with pockets of deep wealth. i should have taken a picture.

i see that in Nashville as well. and basically everywhere?