2020 Democratic presidential primary

Goddamm, for a moment, I got "What It's Like" confused with "What I Got".

― pplains, Wednesday, 17 April 2019 13:27 (twenty-five minutes ago) Permalink

listening to what it's like now, and i realize i was expecting to hear matchbox 20's 'real world'

mayor pete starting to bum me out tbh

I'm just over here quietly praying this election comes down to "What I Am" vs "What's Up"

"What It's Like" is top-notch Old-Man-Hat Rap

how many notches are there and what resides on the lower notches?!

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who is running a climate-focused (and longshot) 2020 campaign, last night asked the Democratic National Committee to set up a debate focused solely on climate change.

“This can’t be a one-off question where candidates get to give a soundbite and move on,” Inslee, who launched a petition, said in a statement. “Climate change is at the heart of every issue that matters to voters, and voters deserve to hear what 2020 presidential candidates plan to do about it.”

https://www.axios.com/jay-inslee-2020-democratic-debate-climate-change-9c60f24d-6cd3-46f0-994b-e63ae868f452.html

only one?

that's one more than we've had in previous election cycles tbf

The DNC offered an extremely noncommittal statement last night, even as the party emphasized the topic's importance and said Republicans "refuse to even acknowledge that climate change is real."

t/s: accepting climate change is real and doing nothing about it vs outright denialism

good luck usa

"A big field definitely helps him, and the longer Biden, Beto and the other stay in"

Is Biden even in yet? I've lost track but I don't think he's officially announced and the longer he goes without doing it the more I think he's not going to

not officially, no

Buttigieg wasn't officially in until last weekend, but he was way more in before that than Biden is now

schrodinger's candidate

Just Biden his time

Obamlet on the Dudson

Meanwhile, on the candidate taxes beat

Beto O’Rourke underpaid taxes twice, report says https://t.co/o1gE6v9QcQ

— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) April 17, 2019

plus I think Ezra Klein recently tweeted out how much each candidate gave to charity last year and Beto was like 0.31% or some shit.

O’Rourke and his wife Amy took medical deductions those years that were not supposed to be available to a person his age, according to the report.

so THIS is the way we find out that beto's been lying about his age all this time

I can't fault Beto when my contributions are a robust 0% but yeah his wife is f'n rich and he should know that people will look at this stuff.

old man o'rourke had better be more careful standing on all those high surfaces, if he falls and breaks his hip he's done for

https://images.app.goo.gl/VToQdYqakHRcBXdt7

Could’ve sworn I saw that Biden was out but I must have been dreaming.

"He faced anti-gay hecklers at two events, including in Des Moines where a man in the crowd shouted ‘remember Sodom and Gomorrah!’ just after Buttigieg talked about marrying his husband, Chasten, who attended the event.

“The man kept shouting but the crowd chants of ‘Pete! Pete!’ drowned him out. Buttigieg calmly looked on as security escorted away the individual. ‘The good news is, the condition of my soul is in the hands of God, but the Iowa caucuses are up to you,’ Buttigieg said to laughter and cheers.

“Two days after officially entering the presidential race, Buttigieg was expecting 50 people at a Polk County meet and greet. As RSVPs rolled in, organizers moved it from a small gym at Franklin Junior High to the large gym, to an auditorium and finally moving it outside. A good thing: a stunning 1,650 people showed up in the end.

“It isn’t just the number of people that stands out: Buttigieg has yet to staff up with organizers in Iowa, so this turnout was mostly organic. Buttigieg spoke to a progressive Iowa group in December and has visited the earlier this year but this crowd was exponentially larger.”

I'm not entirely over Pete but I'm not sure about letting our first First Gentleman be named fucking Chasten

Sanders's program is just not that different from what Democratic voters and politicians stump for anyway

this seems...not true? or at least, if they're stumping for it now it's because he pushed them in that direction (at least re M4A)

also, i too thought i had heard biden was out but apparently was dreaming too

the whole "college should be free thing" was definitely different than what democratic voters/politicians stumped for as recently as 2016. that may have changed now, as more of the primary candidates have been adopting something approaching his positions, or at least indicating that they support the goal. but i'm not sure it's the positions of rank and file democrats who aren't running for president.

same goes for a number of other prominent positions sanders took in 2016

...iirc.

Could’ve sworn I saw that Biden was out but I must have been dreaming.

― don't mock my smock or i'll clean your clock (silby), Wednesday, April 17, 2019 10:57 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Bet you saw something along the lines of:

Biden isn't running, Assad and Putin meet, plus more of today's top headlines: https://t.co/G65R9HWfuG

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) October 21, 2015

But without the date and pic.

that was a communications misunderstanding - biden had declared that he would not run as in he would not be jogging that day. definitely still running for president though

xpost tombot by far Kamala Harris has the best logo.

Inslee on Schulz:

Everybody that can string two words together knows the only consequence of his candidacy would be opening the window of possibility to Trump’s reelection. It’s just, there’s no evidence whatsoever to support that as a rational decision, except wanting to lead to the more probable reelection of Donald Trump.

Presumably you’ve had some sort of relationship with him in the past, as a business leader in the state?

Minimal. He has never really engaged in public policy in my state. AWOL — almost totally — from almost anything having to do with democracy or policy in our state. Doesn’t even vote over half the time. Didn’t vote in the last — we had a school election, to help fund schools! Here’s a guy who wants to be president of the United States who didn’t even deign to vote, what, five weeks ago? Yeah! We had a school bond issue — we’re trying to build schools — here’s a guy who says he wants to be in education, he’s going to reform America and bring a new politics, and the son of a gun doesn’t even vote. What type of embarrassing thing is that? You want to be president and you don’t even vote? You know, that’s just for the little people. In Howard’s life, voting is just for the little people. I don’t think his candidacy is going to soar.

Trump probably never voted either.

wrote himself in probably

Ok so these are pretty nice: https://design.peteforamerica.com/team

I thought this was pretty good, although I don't know that Henwood is giving Warren enough credit on the environment: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/04/elizabeth-warren-transparency-markets-2020-campaign?fbclid=IwAR3BK0DS8j1hStYIYp4VfnXuBJkVKWvcK5jNY9Cy-LEK-K-DTclZ3ua-B6o

She’s not losing. She’s being actively cock blocked by the media. It’s not happening. It’s done. https://t.co/UeaGk882pT

— Eileen Myles (@EileenMyles) April 18, 2019

Some truth in that I think, but her path is surely being blocked by Bernie, not Beto and Mayor Pete? I think her only real route forward is if somehow Bernie drops out and she picks up his voters. I like her well enough, she would be my second choice, but its not a given she would pick up Bernie votes either if he were to drop out for some reason (though I think she should).

but of course the media aren't supporting her, why would they? They prefer narrative to substantive policy, and she wants to tax the owners than most of the others, so she needs grassroots to make up for it, and she doesn't have that either

fbclid=IwAR3BK0DS8j1hStYIYp4VfnXuBJkVKWvcK5jNY9Cy-LEK-K-DTclZ3ua-B6o

america's sweetheart nathan j robinson offers a comprehensive look at warren's (largely v good!) policy proposals here

Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign is not picking up much momentum, but she is consistently producing the most worthwhile and interesting policy proposals of any candidate. Seemingly every week, Warren comes out with a new Big Idea, and they’re all provocative and worth debating. In a country that had intelligent and substantive political media, Warren would be leading the conversation. Sadly, we live in the United States, so our media are discussing Pete Buttigieg’s socks.

Here’s the New Yorker on a Warren speech:

“Let’s start with our values here. And that is: in the richest country in the history of the world, people should not be sleeping on the streets because they don’t have money.” Warren paused for applause before adding, “And I’ve got a plan.”

It’s that last bit that sets her apart. Warren has plans! The list of Excellent Ideas coming out of the Warren camp just grows and grow—on April 11 she released her corporate profits tax plan and on April 15 she released her Public Lands plan

Petri had a pretty otm satire piece about everyone loving and wanting policy and substance but oh no, not Elizabeth Warren's policies. Not those.

this piece on andrew yang from the verge is why tech reporters should be banned from talking about politics

Yang has been campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination all year, but audiences like this have only started to show up in the past couple weeks. The tipping point was an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast in February. It was a deep, analytic, two-hour interview, which is catnip for Rogan’s Reddit-centric audience. Yang’s pitch was simple: automation is destroying American jobs, and we need a president with some kind of answer. If you believe that, the robot-obsessed startup guy could be your only option.

Yang’s answer looks a lot like socialism, although he doesn’t use the word himself. The centerpiece of Yang’s campaign is a $1,000 monthly check to every person in America, paid for with a Nordic-style Value Added Tax. That’s normally called a basic income, although the Yang campaign calls it a “freedom dividend,” since focus group testing found the idea was more popular in the language of corporate ownership. Left-wing think tanks like the Roosevelt Institute and Data for Progress have been pushing a basic income for years as an alternative to the current labyrinth of federal aid programs, but Yang is the first presidential candidate to build a campaign around it.

Yang predicts an epidemic of depreciating human capital hitting profession after profession until society disintegrates, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of human despair.
"“The end state looks unthinkably terrible.”"

It’s grim, with obvious echoes of Marx (who was writing about automation too). But where Marx saw a struggle between discrete classes, Yang sees a tidal wave hitting group after group in sequence. In his reading, no one is safe and we’re all in it together. “Relying on the market is going to get more and more destructive as it zeroes out more and more people,” he says, “unless we come together and build a different kind of economy as fast as possible. And the first concrete step in that direction is to give everyone $1,000 a month in cash.”

fuckin owning the means of production, how does it work

The thing that makes me most happy about the forthcoming Sanders presidency is that there should be a big chance of Warren getting a cabinet position and kicking ass at that. And then a man can get the credit for her work. Sigh.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D4by7CNW0AAz3a8.jpg:large

*unzips*

The Nathan J Robinson piece was fine until the end when he abruptly decides to point out that even though Warren easily has the best and most thought-out plans of anyone in the race, she has no chance of beating our boy Bernie and thank fuck for that!

NJR gives his game away right here:

I’m not much of a policy nerd myself

It's fine if that's true, but he almost seems proud of it.

The thing that makes me most happy about the forthcoming Sanders presidency is that there should be a big chance of Warren getting a cabinet position and kicking ass at that.

Fred... OTM

although obv not counting any chhickens before etc

I think it's beyond foolish at this point to express confidence about who the nominee is going to be in 2020, let alone the President. Maybe there are only 5 or 6 legit contenders but feeling like any of them are a safe bet seems premature.