SUPERTHREAD: 2020 United States Elections

[Mr. G]

Among the current favorites for the nomination I think that only Biden has high chance of beating Trump. Others are either too radical or lack the political skills or the charisma to beat Trump in debates from the perspective of the average voter. You need an old school politician with experience to deal with a crude school bully like Trump.

Since Trump acts like a school bully in debates an opponent that looks wimpy (Pete) or fragile (Sanders) will lose. I also think that being female or ethnic minority is a big disadvantage (I guess a large fraction of the independents which are the ones who decide this kind of election are on average pretty bigoted).

It's true that Biden represents a continuation of Obama's government, and Obama's government did not have a stellar track record: two massive failures in foreign policy with the disasters of Syria and Lybia and relatively poor economic growth (although that was not something that I think Obama could do a lot to change, although the recent tax reform appears to have boosted growth in the short run it is not something democrats tend to do).

But, despite of this bad political capital, I think Biden looks like someone who is able to take on Trump in the debates and win. It's true prediction markets given Biden a 60% chances of beating Trump, although the same markets gave Hillery a 80% chance of beating Trump.

[The Romulan Republic]

Among the current favorites for the nomination I think that only Biden has high chance of beating Trump. Others are either too radical or lack the political skills or the charisma to beat Trump in debates from the perspective of the average voter. You need an old school politician with experience to deal with a crude school bully like Trump.

Since Trump acts like a school bully in debates an opponent that looks wimpy (Pete) or fragile (Sanders) will lose. I also think that being female or ethnic minority is a big disadvantage (I guess a large fraction of the independents which are the ones who decide this kind of election are on average pretty bigoted).

It's true that Biden represents a continuation of Obama's government, and Obama's government did not have a stellar track record: two massive failures in foreign policy with the disasters of Syria and Lybia and relatively poor economic growth (although that was not something that I think Obama could do a lot to change, although the recent tax reform appears to have boosted growth in the short run it is not something democrats tend to do).

But, despite of this bad political capital, I think Biden looks like someone who is able to take on Trump in the debates and win. It's true prediction markets given Biden a 60% chances of beating Trump, although the same markets gave Hillery a 80% chance of beating Trump.

This is basically the traditional Centrist Democrat "wisdom"- the moderate will always win, experience is more important than principles, never do anything bold, the only votes that matter are a relatively small group of mostly white independents, the key to winning is to be in the Center Right (which effectively means moving steadily to the Right to match the Republicans' steady shift Rightward).

Then there's the whole idea that has been making the rounds (encouraged by Republicans) since the 2016 election that the result was some sort of repudiation of women and minorities by the electorate, and that if Democrats want to win, they need to just be focussed on appealing to conservative white men (aka, they need to be Trumpist-lite). Which is not only morally bankrupt, but strategically misguided.

We will not win by being Trumpist-lite. Trump will always have more to offer racists and misogynists than we will unless we become indistinguishable from him on those issues, in which case what's the point of beating him? And focussing everything on winning undecided independents (note: a lot of independents are actually pretty clearly set in terms of who they support, and are independent in name only), or on winning over conservative white men, risks alienating our own base, and costing more votes than we gain.

[Mr. G]

This is basically the traditional Centrist Democrat "wisdom"- the moderate will always win, experience is more important than principles, never do anything bold, the only votes that matter are a relatively small group of mostly white independents, the key to winning is to be in the Center Right (which effectively means moving steadily to the Right to match the Republicans' steady shift Rightward).

Then there's the whole idea that has been making the rounds (encouraged by Republicans) since the 2016 election that the result was some sort of repudiation of women and minorities by the electorate, and that if Democrats want to win, they need to just be focussed on appealing to conservative white men (aka, they need to be Trumpist-lite). Which is not only morally bankrupt, but strategically misguided.

We will not win by being Trumpist-lite. Trump will always have more to offer racists and misogynists than we will unless we become indistinguishable from him on those issues, in which case what's the point of beating him? And focussing everything on winning undecided independents (note: a lot of independents are actually pretty clearly set in terms of who they support, and are independent in name only), or on winning over conservative white men, risks alienating our own base, and costing more votes than we gain.

Well, in my superficial impression I don't think Biden is too different from the other democrats, much less I think that he is Trump-light. My impression is that he is a bit like Bill and Hillary Clinton, a normal moderate democrat.

It is also a fact that millions of Americans are prejudiced. If Hillary were male instead of female I think she would have won a couple million votes more, which could have made a huge difference since 2016 was a very close race. And Biden is pretty much Hillary but male.

Also it's not only a matter of being "centrist" or appealing to white males. To me Pete and Harris sound pretty centrist as well. I think that only Sanders can be considered not centrist according to the American political spectrum. Thing is that I don't think Pete or Harris would perform well in debates against Trump.

When I watched Trump versus Hillary I noticed that based on pure logical analysis of the dialogue Hillary won 90% of the time, but watching it by going with the "emotional flow" it was Trump that was destroying Hillary. 80% of voters don't care about ideas, they don't have the education to have well developed ideology in their heads, they care about how they "feel" regarding the the candidate. In my superficial impression I think Biden has the profile to be more charismatic to the average american than other democrats. But the campaign is only beginning, let's see how it will unfold.

[The Romulan Republic]

This is basically the traditional Centrist Democrat "wisdom"- the moderate will always win, experience is more important than principles, never do anything bold, the only votes that matter are a relatively small group of mostly white independents, the key to winning is to be in the Center Right (which effectively means moving steadily to the Right to match the Republicans' steady shift Rightward).

Then there's the whole idea that has been making the rounds (encouraged by Republicans) since the 2016 election that the result was some sort of repudiation of women and minorities by the electorate, and that if Democrats want to win, they need to just be focussed on appealing to conservative white men (aka, they need to be Trumpist-lite). Which is not only morally bankrupt, but strategically misguided.

We will not win by being Trumpist-lite. Trump will always have more to offer racists and misogynists than we will unless we become indistinguishable from him on those issues, in which case what's the point of beating him? And focussing everything on winning undecided independents (note: a lot of independents are actually pretty clearly set in terms of who they support, and are independent in name only), or on winning over conservative white men, risks alienating our own base, and costing more votes than we gain.

Well, in my superficial impression I don't think Biden is too different from the other democrats, much less I think that he is Trump-light. My impression is that he is a bit like Bill and Hillary Clinton, a normal moderate democrat.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that Biden is Trump-lite. But that's where the strategy you're proposing would ultimately take us, in my view.

It is also a fact that millions of Americans are prejudiced. If Hillary were male instead of female I think she would have won a couple million votes more, which could have made a huge difference since 2016 was a very close race. And Biden is pretty much Hillary but male.

Hillary might also have won if she didn't have so much baggage, if the email scandal hadn't happened, if so many things had been different. To attribute it to her gender, and conclude that we have to only run white men to win, seems a very premature concession to Republican bigotry.

Must we so easily submit to the idea that the only people who will ever really matter are old white men? And what will be the effect on the women and minorities who comprise the vast majority of the Democratic Party's base if we do?

Also it's not only a matter of being "centrist" or appealing to white males. To me Pete and Harris sound pretty centrist as well. I think that only Sanders can be considered not centrist according to the American political spectrum. Thing is that I don't think Pete or Harris would perform well in debates against Trump.

Warren, Yang, and Gabbard are also outside the Center in various ways.

When I watched Trump versus Hillary I noticed that based on pure logical analysis of the dialogue Hillary won 90% of the time, but watching it by going with the "emotional flow" it was Trump that was destroying Hillary. 80% of voters don't care about ideas, they don't have the education to have well developed ideology in their heads, they care about how they "feel" regarding the the candidate. In my superficial impression I think Biden has the profile to be more charismatic to the average american than other democrats. But the campaign is only beginning, let's see how it will unfold.

In terms of raw charisma, Corey Booker is also strong, and Bernie Sanders has a surprising ability to generate enthusiasm, just off the top of my head.

[The Romulan Republic]

Line-up for each night announced:

https://www.npr.org/2019/06/14/73273507 ... o-face-off

The lineups are set for the first Democratic presidential primary debates.

Among the debate matchups: Former Vice President Joe Biden, currently leading in primary polls nationally, will face off against Vermont senator and 2016 candidate Bernie Sanders, as well as California Sen. Kamala Harris and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

Meanwhile, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren will face New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar.

Owing to the massive field of candidates, the DNC has spread the field across two, two-hour debates on June 26-27. It also made sure to split the candidates with the highest poll numbers evenly across both nights, to avoid a "kids table" debate situation. The Republican Party faced that criticism in its 2016 primary debates, when it put the lower-polling candidates in a separate debate from the higher-polling candidates.

Candidates for the June 26 debate: New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, former HUD Secretary Julián Castro, former Maryland Rep. John Delaney, Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, former Texas Rep. Beto O'Rourke, Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Candidates for the June 27 debate: Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet; former Vice President Joe Biden; South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg; New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand; California Sen. Kamala Harris; former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper; Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders; California Rep. Eric Swalwell; writer and spiritual guru Marianne Williamson and entrepreneur Andrew Yang.

To qualify for the debates, candidates had to amass 65,000 donors, spread across 20 states, or they had to get at least 1% support across three national or early-state polls.

Of the 23 major Democratic candidates, three did not qualify: Montana Gov. Steve Bullock; Miramar, Fla., Mayor Wayne Messam; and Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton. Bullock on Thursday sent a letter to the DNC arguing that he did qualify, but the DNC has not changed its lineup.

The lineups were set by a manual drawing at NBC News headquarters in New York with a representative of each campaign present, the network said. After the groups were drawn, NBC decided who would go on which night. Their placements onstage will be decided later, based on polling.

The debates will air on NBC, MSNBC and Telemundo at 9 p.m. ET on both nights.

Sigh...

For all their goal of splitting the major candidates evenly across both nights, they didn't really manage that. Because of the five who are actually looking like serious contenders right now (Biden, Warren, Bernie, Buttigieg, Harris), they ended up putting four of them on the second night, with Warren the odd one out. Which of course means a lot of people will probably just watch the big names (especially Biden/Sanders) facing off, and skip the second, effectively sidelining Warren.

On the plus side, she's going to be the center of attention on her night, but its essentially split into the serious candidates' night with a few hanger-ons, and the kid's table plus Warren.

[FaxModem1]

They probably thought Harris and Buttigieg didn't really count, and distributing Warren, Sanders, and Biden was the most important choice. On the plus side, Biden won't be alone with the kids table, which would boost him way too much because no one could take him apart, and give him a false sense of invincibility to the voters. Having him face off against Sanders will hopefully give Sanders weight, and make the primary not as much of a lock-in as previously thought.

Or, hypothetically, the organizers are taking a page out of Trump's book, and having Biden deal with Sanders now, then Warren down the road, so that he can line his ducks in a road.

[Mr. G]

Double post

[Mr. G]

I wouldn't go so far as to say that Biden is Trump-lite. But that's where the strategy you're proposing would ultimately take us, in my view.

Trump is an anti-stablishment postmodern populist. Biden is a stablishment old school liberal. Biden is pretty much the anti-Trump. Other democrat candidates are closer to Trump in ways than Biden is not. For example, Bernie is also a populist, but an old school populist. While Harris and Pete are very postmodern candidates.

What I am saying is just this: I think Biden has a better shoot of beating Trump than the other candidates. I am not saying he is "better" or "worse" or that the democrats should push him.

It is also a fact that millions of Americans are prejudiced. If Hillary were male instead of female I think she would have won a couple million votes more, which could have made a huge difference since 2016 was a very close race. And Biden is pretty much Hillary but male.

Hillary might also have won if she didn't have so much baggage, if the email scandal hadn't happened, if so many things had been different. To attribute it to her gender, and conclude that we have to only run white men to win, seems a very premature concession to Republican bigotry.

Must we so easily submit to the idea that the only people who will ever really matter are old white men? And what will be the effect on the women and minorities who comprise the vast majority of the Democratic Party's base if we do?

It's not about "submission" it is about accepting the reality that the US is a country full of bigots (like every country) and the bigotry has been a factor in previous elections and will be a factor future elections.

I was not making any attempt to advocate a strategy here but just stating what I perceived to be factors that make Biden the strongest of the favorite democrat candidates against Trump.

[The Romulan Republic]

They probably thought Harris and Buttigieg didn't really count, and distributing Warren, Sanders, and Biden was the most important choice. On the plus side, Biden won't be alone with the kids table, which would boost him way too much because no one could take him apart, and give him a false sense of invincibility to the voters. Having him face off against Sanders will hopefully give Sanders weight, and make the primary not as much of a lock-in as previously thought.

Or, hypothetically, the organizers are taking a page out of Trump's book, and having Biden deal with Sanders now, then Warren down the road, so that he can line his ducks in a road.

Apparently its supposed to be randomized, so presuming the organizers stuck to that, what happened is probably that they set the bar for "major candidate" too low (ie at 2%), and then the random draw put all the really major ones (save Warren) in one night.

It actually could play to Warren's favour, though, as it makes her by far the main draw of the first night, and avoids being just one more person piling onto Biden on the second night, as this article points out:

https://time.com/5607529/democratic-pri ... th-warren/

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren caught something of a break at Friday’s random dividing of the Democratic debate schedule, emerging as the strongest candidate on the first of two debates and dodging what’s shaping up to be a Joe Biden pile-on during the second.

Frontrunner Biden is scheduled to come face-to-face with Sen. Bernie Sanders, a grassroots favorite from Vermont; South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who’s had a surprisingly strong showing so far; and Sen. Kamala Harris of California on the second night of debates. The division all but guarantees that Biden will be playing defense against some of his stronger opponents.

Biden faces a second risk in his debate, which features Buttigieg, 37, and California Rep. Eric Swalwell, 38, who will have an opportunity to cast him and Sanders as septuagenarians out of step with the party’s younger voters.

For her part, Warren will face her strongest competitors on June 26 from fellow Sens. Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar. Still, it’s tough to see ideological fireworks here. Booker has co-sponsored nine of Warren’s bills in this Congress, while Klobuchar has signed onto 10 of Warren’s proposals, and Warren has backed four of Klobuchar’s and seven of Booker’s bills. The trio, advisers say, actually like one another, and the Senate’s long tradition of comity might make it hard to attack each other anyway.

Still, there lingers some oddity about the lineup.

NBC News went to great lengths to make sure there wasn’t a main event and an undercard, unlike four years ago when it was the Republican Party that had such a mass of candidates. Network organizers this week divided the field into two camps: those polling about 2% and those below. NBC officials wanted to spread out the tiers across two nights and drew folded sheets of paper to randomly assign half of the top tier to one night and the rest to go later.

But fortune is blind, and it still feels like night two is the main event, given the cluster of better-polling candidates on that night. That gives Warren a primetime chance to pitch her big ideas against candidates who, frankly, may seem less serious of a threat.

Biden advisers know he’ll face incoming fire. The longtime senator hasn’t debated since 2012 and hasn’t publicly sparred with fellow Democrats since 2007. Despite Biden’s pronouncement this week that he’s prepared for the debate, he’s still spending at least a little time every day working on his answers. He is expected to take much of the next week to focus on his responses, working with former Obama White House communications maven Anita Dunn and longtime aides Ron Klain and Steve Ricchetti. Also in the room or on the line, policy adviser Stef Feldman and deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield. They are keenly aware of the value of a rival leveling a brutal blow and how easy it can be to get under the Vice President’s skin.

The line-up also gives a bonus for Sanders, a favorite of a small but active group on the far left. Just this week, Sanders took to a podium on a Washington, D.C., campus to extol the virtues of democratic socialism, which for many younger voters has lost the Cold War connotations. He will have the chance to take on former Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Biden.

And Harris, too, drew luckily. The Senator from California has slowly been building her campaign and in hearings on Capitol Hill has shown herself to be well prepared and crisp with her comments. As an alternative to Biden and Sanders, she could well have a moment to do on a national stage what she’s been doing in committee hearings since she arrived in Washington in 2017.

Still, the evening is the first real opportunity for these candidates to make an impression. The 2016 debates were ratings gold. The first Republican sparring drew 24 million viewers. As Buzzfeed first reported, NBC execs decided to broadcast the Biden cohort second to land the most eyeballs.

The lesser-knowns will, of course, have potential. No one was taking Buttigieg that seriously until he executed a pitch-perfect CNN town hall that left many asking “Mayor Who?” One-time political curiosity Donald Trump dominated rivals with far better political resumes to dethrone former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. And Biden himself used a buzzy moment in 2007 — to define Rudy Giuliani’s campaign as “noun and a verb and 9/11” — to inject a last hope into his second bid for the White House.

Still, there will be a temptation to land the rehearsed jab at Biden or Sanders. But history has shown those practiced lines can backfire. One need only to Google “Robot Marco” to know how Marco Rubio repeated himself during one 2016 debate to be reminded how badly polish can come off. Instead, it’s the authentic if raw moments (Barack Obama telling Hillary Clinton in 2008 that she was “likeable enough” comes to mind) that define debate memories.

And those come based on a candidates’ core strengths and weaknesses, not based on a network schedule.

[The Romulan Republic]

Also, turns out that basic income support aside, Andrew Yang sucks:

https://www.inquisitr.com/54480/andrew- ... osecution/

Presidential hopeful Andrew Yang recently made a controversial Twitter comment — at least amongst his fans — that suggested the United States should avoid prosecuting President Donald Trump after his presidency. He urged people to focus on winning the 2020 election and solving the problems that got Trump elected — which he believes is job loss in the manufacturing sector due to automation.

Not long after Yang made the comment Thursday, he spoke to Fox News to clarify it.

“If you look around the world, one pattern that America should seek to avoid is prosecuting past leaders and presidents and imprisoning them. That’s something that America has never fallen into and that’s the way I would hope that we proceed with me in the White House.”

During the same interview, Yang commented on Trump’s recent ABC News interview with George Stephanopoulos and his comment that he would still accept dirt on his opponents from foreign sources — even after everything his administration went through during Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference.

Yang said “it’s simultaneously both shocking and unsurprising. And it certainly lends credence to the fact that he was both open [to] that sort of thing during the 2016 election. So it’s very distressing to the American people.”

But Yang remained firm in his belief that the goal should be on getting Trump out of office in 2020, and highlights that this is what he’s working to accomplish.

When pressed about whether House Democrats should begin impeachment proceedings against Trump, Yang said that it’s an issue Congress must decide on its own while he focuses on “beating him in the ballot box in 2020.”

Yang recently used Twitter to reveal that he believes political polls underestimate his support. He highlights the fact that most of these polls are still conducted with landlines, although he admits that this is still a channel he must work to reach people through.

As The Inquisitr reported, most major media polls conducted by outlets like CNN and Fox News rely on traditional phone methodology to create random samples of Americans. In addition, response rates for phone polls in 2018 was just 6 percent, suggesting that they are not an accurate way to obtain a representation of American opinions.

But Politico claims that moving polls into the online landscape is more complicated than it seems, as national panels are too small for surveying individual states. Mark Blumenthal, a pollster and co-founder of the website Pollster.com, said that this challenge is especially problematic for political campaigns and advocacy groups that want to create samples of American opinions in smaller states as well as below the state level.

So, he supports lifetime immunity from prosecution for Presidents. Alright, fuck him.

Also endorsing the "Trump was just a protest against economic injustice, its not about racism and misogyny" narrative. Guess all that talk about not courting Alt. Reich support was just talk, and he really does want their votes.

His education policy also turns out to be a crock of corporatist shit:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereknewto ... 255962794e

Andrew Yang is running for President where his policy ideas such as universal basic income are earning him a growing cadre of followers. And unlike many other candidates, Yang’s proposals are rich and detailed, which is great.

Yang’s rich and detailed plans for higher education, though, are not great. They are at once incorrect, dishonest, dangerous and likely the most hostile to higher education proposed by any candidate in a generation. In many ways, what Yang proposes for higher education would be worse than what President Trump has already done

As examples, Yang supports cutting funding for colleges and cutting student loans. He incorrectly and deceptively questions the value of college, blames academic bureaucrats, ignores the carnage caused by for-profit colleges and even recycles and misuses conservative, anti-education talking points from the Reagan administration.

Here are some examples.

For-Profit Colleges

As background, it’s important to note that Yang was the CEO of a for-profit education company, Manhattan GMAT, a test-preparation company. He was in charge during its 2009 sale to Kaplan, the billion-dollar, for-profit education company and the namesake of the former for-profit, mostly online Kaplan University. A profile of Yang in The Verge said the sale of Manhattan to Kaplan was, “a huge windfall for anyone holding stock,” which Yang was.

That’s important because, in thousands of words of higher education policy proposals, Yang never mentions for-profit schools. Even though they are a major driver of student debt, school closures, lawsuits, substandard outcomes, online education and loan defaults, for-profit colleges are absent from Yang’s policy plans.

The closest Yang gets to calling out for-profit colleges is proposing “a commission that will explore debt forgiveness or reduction for students who sought degrees under false pretenses.” It’s already possible to seek debt cancellation if you’ve been defrauded. Moreover, “a commission” to “explore” does nothing to prevent schools from defrauding students and misusing federal grants and loans in the first place.

Yang does also propose to “close schools with high loan default rates and consistently low employment placement success,” and “police and prosecute all marketing representations of schools that might induce enrollment under false pretenses.” Again, policing and prosecuting misleading marketing is already possible, although it seldom happens. And it’s not clear how a President can close schools. But by flagging bad conduct instead of the profit-seeking business model that drives it, Yang does not seem to see rewarding private investors with federal education funds as a problem on its own. And he proposes no solution beyond what’s already the law.

Cuts College

Yang is under the impression that colleges and universities are expensive because they can’t control their costs, that they are bloated, inefficient, top-heavy and leaking money. “It’s likely that schools are not up to the task of bringing down their own budgets, and government will have to help them scale back and become more cost-efficient,” Yang’s plans say. “Colleges need to tighten up,” Yang tweeted in September.

Setting aside that some 78% of undergraduates go to public schools that are already run by the government, the idea that colleges spend too much money and are incapable of doing otherwise is a talking point that’s repeatedly used to cut education funding. And cutting funding is clearly what Yang means by “scale back” and “become more cost-efficient.” Yang has proposed many ways in which he’d shrink college funding.

In addition to being short-sighted, forced budget cutting at colleges doesn’t work. The last time the government scaled back higher education funding, as a result of the 2008 recession, tuition went up and so did student borrowing and debt.

Blame Administrators

Yang frequently repeats a trope linking the rising cost of higher education to “administrative excess.” In December, Yang tweeted, “Why has college gotten 250% more expensive in the past 30 years? It’s not quality improvements. Or faculty. Or even facilities. It’s administration and bureaucracy. The number of college administrators has gone up 250% in the same period.” In September, it was, “College has tripled in price despite no real change in quality. It is not professors or even facilities. It is administrators…” And so on.

So solid is the link between college administrators and costs in Yang’s view that he proposes, “as a condition of public funding,” schools be required to meet “a desired ratio of administrators to students” saying if we do that, “college will be much cheaper.”

The simple problem is that’s not true. Or, at best, it’s flimsy. While there are more non-academic staff at colleges now than there were 30 years ago, there are also more computers. College is different than it was in 1988. We’re asking colleges to do way more than we did then. Today, we expect, even demand, that colleges provide more financial, health, technology, safety and career services to student populations that are growing in number and diversity.

Threatening to cut college funding over the number of nameless administrators is foremost, another proposed cut to college funding endorsed by Yang. But it’s also a wildly popular idea in conservative, anti-education circles. So much so that it was recently expressly endorsed on the opinion pages of the arch-conservative Wall St. Journal.

Even more, at one point, Yang directly linked the rising cost of college to the ability of students to pay for it. “College tuition is skyrocketing not because consumers have choices - quite the opposite. It is skyrocketing because government has subsidized massive loans just for education. I’d scale that back,” he tweeted in September.

Here, Yang is saying directly that he’d cut access to federal student loans. But he's also repeating what’s known as the Bennett Hypothesis. Named for conservative Republican Bill Bennett, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of education, it's the baseless idea that access to federal loans allows colleges to increase their prices without reason and that, as a consequence, there’s no point in investing more money in education because it will only make college more expensive. Even though it’s unproven, the idea has been used since the 1980s as an excuse to deny funding boosts for colleges, grants and loans.

The Jobs, ROI

Yang also likes to say that colleges are failing the jobs test. Not only is the premise itself flawed, the information Yang shares to make his point is felony-level misinformation.

“The underemployment rate for college grads is 34% overall and 44% for recent college graduates. We should stop pretending that college degrees create jobs. They often don’t,” he tweeted in April. He’s cited that 44% underemployment number at least 16 times on Twitter, often linking it to record student debt levels, implying that students are going in debt for nothing.

The 44% number comes from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Yang cites it in this Forbes article which says plainly, “This measure is undoubtedly subjective and should thus be taken with a grain of salt.” Further, the rate is basically unchanged since 1989, meaning it has nothing to do with new debt levels or exploding numbers of college administrators, Yang loves to talk about.

But the bigger point is in the opening line to the Forbes article Yang shares, which says, “It’s well known that college graduates enjoy both lower unemployment rates and higher earnings ...” No kidding. Having a college degree absolutely makes you more likely to have a job and earn more money. In fact, just this week, the New York Fed, the source of Yang’s repeated 44% stat, published a paper titled, “Despite Rising Costs, College Is Still a Good Investment.”

Yang is flat wrong on there being no link between college and good jobs. And implying so, letting young people believe there’s any good reason to forgo college, is not just bad advice, it’s borderline immoral, on par with denying the science of climate change.

ROI as Funding Policy

But it’s not just that Yang pushes down the value of college, it’s that his belief shows up in his policy proposals. Specifically, Yang proposes to “create an information database on all post-secondary education institutions” that will accumulate loan, employment and wage data. Again, this already exists, but that’s not the point because Yang says he wants to “stipulate that any university that receives public funding cannot increase its costs by more than the rate of annual median wage growth [of its graduates] the year before.”

It’s not clear how President Yang would “stipulate” such a thing. Nonetheless, tying education funding to wage gains belongs in the pantheon of bad ideas because it fails basic economics. But also because it, again, sets this idea that colleges would do better if someone yanked their funding chain. But foremost, it’s an awful idea because colleges don’t exist to do job training for business, they serve a different, better, higher purpose.

Student Debt

Yang has ideas on student debt too, but mostly they prove that he doesn’t understand it. For example, Yang wants to “initiate a program that allows graduates to pay a percentage of income instead of a fixed amount.” And, again, that program already exists. Yang also says he wants to “ask schools to forgive in part or in whole the debts of those who do not graduate,” seemingly unaware that schools don’t generally make student loans or carry student debt. And even if they did, Yang seems blind to the perverse incentive his policy would create – drop out and get your loans forgiven, stick it out and owe.

His campaign also promises to “immediately reduce the student loan payments for millions of Americans by ensuring that the American government does not profit one cent from its educational loan servicing.” But Yang is off again. Depending on how you count it, the federal government does not make a profit on its direct student loans. In fact, there’s general agreement that the program probably loses money in the long run. Moreover, the only way to be sure the government’s student loans don’t make money is to shift more of the risk to borrowers, actually increasing their payments.

As for what Yang actually wants, he told Bloomberg, “my plan is to forgive the vast majority of that student loan debt” even though his written plans do not say that. Instead, his plans say he wants to “explore a blanket partial reduction in the principal of school loans for recent graduates.” It is not clear what exploring a partial reduction means but it’s obviously not a specific plan that outlines who would get forgiveness, for what or when.

Free College

Yang does have a written plan to make community colleges “tuition free or nearly-free for anyone.” But it appears Yang himself may not agree with it. In December Yang tweeted, “Many progressives are for free college education. I’m for the spirit of that but think it is the wrong policy. You are pretending that college degrees create jobs. They don’t. They create underemployed college grads” – returning to the bogus idea that college degrees aren’t worth it and hinting at the misleading underemployment stat.

Curiously, just as Yang never mentions for-profit colleges, his plans also never mention the one thing that can, and does, make college free for millions of low-income Americans – Pell Grants. They are the single biggest, best way to expand access to higher education and reduce student loans, which is why every other Democratic candidate for President has called for increasing them.

Odd and Good

Not all Yang’s education ideas are bad. He wants a ban on linking compensation for any college employee to a college’s rankings, such as those made by U.S. News and World Report - a ban on bonuses for rankings boosts. That’s probably a good idea. He also wants to reform those ranking systems, though he does not say how. That’s probably a good idea too unless he wants to make the rankings only about job outcomes. Yang also wants to “revisit” the tax status of some colleges with large endowments, which is a discussion worth having.

He also has some education ideas that are just odd, such as calling for a tax on existing, well-endowed schools to start new schools no one is asking for in places where college enrollment is actually shrinking. He also has a plan to get exclusive schools to expand when doing so would, by definition, ruin their exclusivity.

Yang and all candidates for office should know that spending less money on colleges, cutting student loans, blaming administrators, misleading people about college outcomes and ignoring the for-profits is a recipe for killing American higher education. It’s not clear whether Yang just doesn’t know that’s what he’s proposing or whether that’s what he wants.

I spoke with Yang’s Press Secretary, Randy Jones, who asked that I send questions about Yang’s education plans to him in writing. The campaign did not respond to those questions or agree to make Yang available for an interview.

After this article posted, Yang Tweeted, "... I think you have misrepresented my point of view. Agree that for-profit schools are among the biggest abusers and problematic actors - several of my policies are geared in that direction. Also agree that college is by and large a good thing."

I reiterate, fuck him.

[The Romulan Republic]

Buttigieg cancels campaign events to return to his job as mayor after a police officer in his town shoots a black man:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/us/p ... oting.html

Pete Buttigieg pulled himself off the presidential campaign trail on Monday and returned to his day job as mayor of South Bend, Ind., after a police officer there shot and killed a black man.

“I know that whenever an incident like this happens, there is tremendous hurt that can come about,” Mr. Buttigieg said at a news conference on Sunday night.

The downshift from national campaigning comes at a time when Mr. Buttigieg has risen to the top tier of 2020 Democratic candidates. But he has struggled to win over African-American voters in early-voting states like South Carolina.

He presides over a midsize city with a large minority population, where his relations with African-American voters were damaged early in his tenure after he fired the city’s first black police chief. Mr. Buttigieg said the chief improperly handled recordings of police officers’ phone calls, a case that dragged through the courts for years.

Mr. Buttigieg, 37, has worked hard to mend fences at home and as a candidate, but his rallies have been characterized by a paucity of black faces.

The latest episode risks highlighting friction between the police and minority communities in South Bend, but it also offers Mr. Buttigieg a platform to show his command of the issue.

One of the reasons he hurried home, he said, was because of past lessons learned.

“We’ve had prior cases of use-of-force incidents and officer-involved shootings where I hesitated, frankly, to get in front of cameras because we didn’t know very much and it was out of our hands,” he said. “But what I learned, what I was told by people in the community, is it’s important to open channels of communication.”

The man killed by the police, Eric Logan, 54, was shot around 3:30 a.m. Sunday after the police responded to a report of a person rifling through cars downtown, according to the St. Joseph County prosecutor’s office.

The authorities said that when an officer approached Mr. Logan, he raised a knife and was shot and killed.

Mr. Logan’s widow, Shafonia Logan, 50, said on Monday that she had more questions than answers. “I want justice for my husband,” she told reporters. “What they say is he was breaking into a car. Was that justifiable to shoot and kill him?”

Mr. Buttigieg withdrew from an L.G.B.T. gala in New York on Monday night. He also canceled a series of fund-raising events he was scheduled to attend Tuesday and Wednesday in California with entertainment figures, including the director and producer Ryan Murphy, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The rollout of a new policy originally set for Wednesday is also being rescheduled.

It is unclear how long Mr. Buttigieg, who raised an impressive $7 million in April, will remain off the campaign trail.

[The Romulan Republic]

Fox News poll shows Trump losing to five Democrats, and losing to Biden and Bernie in landslides:

https://www.newsweek.com/fox-news-poll- ... ce-1444216

A new poll from President Donald Trump's favorite TV network did not bode well for the commander-in-chief's goal of being elected for a second term. According to Fox News, the president is currently lagging behind as many as five of the Democratic candidates for the 2020 presidential election.

The latest poll, conducted between June 9 and June 12, found Democratic frontrunners — former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders — each garnering 49 percent of the vote in a hypothetical head-to-head against the president.

Biden fared slightly better against Trump, beating the incumbent by ten percentage points, while Sanders had a slightly smaller gap of nine points over the president.

The remaining three Democrats who could possibly unseat Trump were Senators Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana.

Warren, who was the first of the Democratic hopefuls to publicly call for Trump to be impeached holds the slight edge in this trio, beating the president by 43 percent to 41 percent. Harris — who has also since called for Trump's ouster — and Buttigieg each came out on top against the president, but only by a single percentage point.

It is worth noting that all three of the results for these candidates were within the three percentage point margin of error for the poll, so one could arguably view them as being in a dead heat with the president. The Biden and Sanders results, however, were far outside of that margin.

Frequent Trump critic George Conway, attorney and husband of White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway, used the Fox News poll results to mock the president on Sunday morning.

Appearing to adopt the president's Twitter traits of using lots of exclamation points and the caps lock button, Conway sarcastically tweeted about the poll: "Outrageous! The Lying and Corrupt News Media is at it again! FAKE NEWS even from FOX NEWS!"

The Fox News poll results were not terribly dissimilar from a Quinnipiac University poll released last week that showed Trump lagging behind six Democratic contenders.

In that poll, 53 percent of voters said they would support Biden over Trump's 40 percent. Sanders polled at 51 percent to 42 percent for the president. Harris and Warren performed better in the Quinnipiac poll, with leads of eight and seven percentage points, respectively, over Trump. Senator Cory Booker, who was not listed in the Fox News results and Buttigieg each enjoyed a five-point margin.

Of course, the actual election is still more than a year away, and the Democratic candidates have yet to even hold their first debate.

Twenty of the 24 current Democratic candidates will take part in that first debate later this month. Because the field of hopefuls is so large, the panels have been divided and split into two events. Warren and Booker are the biggest names in the June 26 panel, while the June 27 debate will feature Biden, Sanders, Harris and Buttigieg.

The orange cock, meanwhile, is threatening an economic crash if he's not reelected.

Will tomorrow be the day that we finally see him call Fox fake news?

[FaxModem1]

Fox News poll shows Trump losing to five Democrats, and losing to Biden and Bernie in landslides:

https://www.newsweek.com/fox-news-poll- ... ce-1444216

The orange cock, meanwhile, is threatening an economic crash if he's not reelected.

Will tomorrow be the day that we finally see him call Fox fake news?

You called this one:

The Daily Beast

President Trump Calls Fox News ‘Fake News’ for Citing Unfavorable Poll Numbers
Matt WilsteinSenior Writer
Updated 06.17.19 9:12PM ET / Published 06.17.19 8:37PM ET

Kevin Lamarque
Donald Trump accused Fox News anchor Bret Baier of pushing “fake news” Monday night after the anchor cited figures from his network’s own polling that shows former Vice President Joe Biden leading the president in several battleground states. “Something weird going on at Fox,” Trump tweeted, claiming that his campaign’s internal polls “show us leading in all 17 Swing States,” despite leaked evidence to the contrary.

The president also disputed that he spent 30 hours with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, as the network repeatedly stated in promotional messages for its exclusive interview. “More Fake News @BretBaier,” Trump tweeted, using an epithet that he casually uses against every major news organization in America but has rarely, if ever, used to describe Fox News.


Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
.@FoxNews Polls are always bad for me. They were against Crooked Hillary also. Something weird going on at Fox. Our polls show us leading in all 17 Swing States. For the record, I didn’t spend 30 hours with @abcnews, but rather a tiny fraction of that. More Fake News @BretBaier

43.1K
6:49 PM - Jun 17, 2019

[The Romulan Republic]

His unpredictability has become predictable.

[The Romulan Republic]

The historically pro-Republican Orlando Sentinel responded to Trump beginning his campaign in Orlando by announcing their 2020 endorsement: anyone but Trump.

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/opinion ... story.html

Donald Trump is in Orlando to announce the kickoff of his re-election campaign.

We’re here to announce our endorsement for president in 2020, or, at least, who we’re not endorsing: Donald Trump.

Some readers will wonder how we could possibly eliminate a candidate so far before an election, and before knowing the identity of his opponent.

Because there’s no point pretending we would ever recommend that readers vote for Trump.

After 2½ years we’ve seen enough.

Enough of the chaos, the division, the schoolyard insults, the self-aggrandizement, the corruption, and especially the lies.

So many lies — from white lies to whoppers — told out of ignorance, laziness, recklessness, expediency or opportunity.

Trump’s capacity for lying isn’t the surprise here, though the frequency is.

It’s the tolerance so many Americans have for it.

There was a time when even a single lie — a phony college degree, a bogus work history — would doom a politician’s career.

Not so for Trump, who claimed in 2017 that he lost the popular vote because millions of people voted illegally (they didn’t). In 2018 he said North Korea was no longer a nuclear threat (it is). And in 2019 he said windmills cause cancer (they don’t). Just last week he claimed the media fabricated unfavorable results from his campaign’s internal polling (it didn’t).

According to a Washington Post database, the president has tallied more than 10,000 lies since he took office.

Trump’s successful assault on truth is the great casualty of this presidency, followed closely by his war on decency.

Trump insults political opponents and national heroes alike with middle-school taunts. He demonstrates no capacity for empathy or remorse. He misuses his office to punish opponents, as when he recently called for a boycott of AT&T to get even with his least favorite media outlet, CNN. He tears down institutions, once airily suggesting the U.S. should try having a leader for life as China now allows. He seems incapable of learning a lesson, telling an ABC interviewer last week — just two months after Robert Mueller’s report on election interference was released — that he would accept dirt on an opponent from Russia or China.

Trump has diminished our standing in the world. He reneges on deals, attacks allies and embraces enemies.

This nation must never forget that humiliating public moment in Helsinki in 2018 when the president of the United States chose to accept Vladimir Putin’s denials of Russian interference in the 2016 election over the unanimous assessment of the American intelligence community.

Such a betrayal by a U.S. president would have been the unforgivable political sin in normal times.

As if that’s not enough, Trump declares his love for North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, a genuine villain who starves and enslaves his people and executes his enemies with antiaircraft guns and flamethrowers.

But he wrote the president a “beautiful letter.” Flattery will get you everywhere with this president, and that’s dangerous.

Domestically, the president’s signature issue — immigration — has moved in fits and starts. Happily, he abandoned pursuing an outright — and unconstitutional — ban on Muslims entering the U.S., opting instead to restrict travel for people from a handful of nations, most of them majority Muslim.

He’s tried separating families, sending troops to the border and declaring a national emergency. For all of that, illegal border crossings are, as the president himself calls it, at crisis levels.

He blames House Democrats because casting blame is Trump’s forte. But Republicans controlled the House and the Senate for two full years. That seemed like an ideal time to fix what the president believes ails our immigration laws.

Even with Democrats now controlling the House, where is Trump’s much-touted deal-making mojo, an attribute he campaigned on?

“But the economy!”

Yes, the market has done well since Trump’s election.

The S&P 500 was up about 21% between Trump’s inauguration and May 31 of his third year in office. Under President Obama, it was up about 56% in that same period.

Unemployment is headed down, as it was during seven straight years under Obama.

Wages are up, and that’s a welcome change. But GDP increases so far are no better than some periods under Obama. Deficit spending under Obama was far too high, in part because of the stimulus needed to dig out of the Great Recession. Under Trump, it’s still headed in the wrong direction, once again pushing $1 trillion even though the economy is healthy.

Trump seems to care nothing about the deficit and the national debt, which once breathed life into the Tea Party.

Through all of this, Trump’s base remains loyal. Sadly, the truest words Trump might ever have spoken was when he said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose his supporters.

This non-endorsement isn’t defaulting to whomever the Democrats choose. This newspaper has a history of presidential appointments favoring Republicans starting in the mid-20th century. Except for Lyndon Johnson in 1964, the Sentinel backed Republican presidential nominees from 1952 through 2004, when we recommended John Kerry over another four years of George W. Bush.

As recently as 2012 we recommended Republican Mitt Romney because of what seemed at the time to be Obama’s failure to adequately manage the nation’s finances.

If — however unlikely — a Republican like Romney, now a senator from Utah, or former Ohio Gov. John Kasich successfully primaried the president, we would eagerly give them a look. Same if an independent candidate mounted a legitimate campaign.

We’d even consider backing Trump if, say, he found the proverbial cure for cancer or — about as likely — changed the essence of who he is (he won’t).

The nation must endure another 1½ years of Trump. But it needn’t suffer another four beyond that.

We can do better. We have to do better.

[houser2112]

Another Republican bastion spouting "fake news" about Trump. I love it.

[FireNexus]

They probably thought Harris and Buttigieg didn't really count, and distributing Warren, Sanders, and Biden was the most important choice. On the plus side, Biden won't be alone with the kids table, which would boost him way too much because no one could take him apart, and give him a false sense of invincibility to the voters. Having him face off against Sanders will hopefully give Sanders weight, and make the primary not as much of a lock-in as previously thought.

Or, hypothetically, the organizers are taking a page out of Trump's book, and having Biden deal with Sanders now, then Warren down the road, so that he can line his ducks in a road.

Sanders is a dumbass, and only capable of speaking in his stump speech. He was made to look stupid every time he debated Clinton, and got graded on a curve because he was Not Clinton. Which, honestly, is a microcosm of his entire 2016 arc. He lucked out hard not being on stage with Warren, because her actual grasp of policy and nuance would make him look even dumber than he normally does.

[The Romulan Republic]

I see Sanders as a man who has a few good ideas that are (or were) outside the box and sticks to them closely, and because of that he was able to fire up a base and help shift the country Leftward. But the flip-side of that is that he is prone to tunnel-vision, is needlessly polarizing at times, and is often awkward dealing with issues outside his wheelhouse.

[Ziggy Stardust]

He was made to look stupid every time he debated Clinton, and got graded on a curve because he was Not Clinton.

Are you referring to anything specific here, or is this just another side of the general vitriol you seem to have for Sanders? I'm not even trying to defend Sanders or troll you here, or anything. It's just that in my lifetime I can't recall a single presidential debate that made ANY of the candidates look smart. The entire debate circuit has long been nothing more than a series of uninteresting and unfocused questions that receive in response the same staid platitudes out of a book of political cliches. It's not like they actually ever say anything about policy, other than the broad strokes stuff that everyone already knew anyway. It's basically just the same stump speeches the candidates give, broken up into little morsels. It makes them all look like a bunch of phony morons. So it seems odd to me to single out Sanders, unless there is some spectacular flame-out I'm forgetting. And from where I stand I find it hard to put much faith in what you say about him because your hatred of him borders on the irrational (again, I'm really not trying to troll you or defend Sanders specifically, I'm lukewarm on him as a candidate at best, but it just really seems sometimes like he ran over your puppy or something).

[The Romulan Republic]

Members of the public can submit questions for the first primary debate. I submitted the following:

1. Given the increasing loss of jobs to automation, would you support a Universal Basic Income program?

2. Do you believe that Donald Trump should be impeached, and do you believe that he should be indicted after leaving office? Or should Presidents be immune to serious legal consequences for the sake of “bipartisanship”?

3. How do you believe the State of Oregon should respond to recent threats of violent resistance from Republican state lawmakers and Right-wing militia groups?

[FireNexus]

He was made to look stupid every time he debated Clinton, and got graded on a curve because he was Not Clinton.

Are you referring to anything specific here, or is this just another side of the general vitriol you seem to have for Sanders?

Honestly just to my impression (admittedly years old) that he looked like a moron when he debated. I watched all the debates in full, and recall yelling at the TV about the dumb shit he was saying even in the October debate before my hate collapsed into the dense mass supported from final collapse into singularity only by hatron degeneracy pressure.

I wouldn’t be able to point to a specific example from the debates without more legwork than I care to do at the moment, so you can take that for what you will.

It's just that in my lifetime I can't recall a single presidential debate that made ANY of the candidates look smart. The entire debate circuit has long been nothing more than a series of uninteresting and unfocused questions that receive in response the same staid platitudes out of a book of political cliches.

Sure, that is part and parcel of debates. The problem with Sanders, and why he looks particularly stupid pretty much any time he’s not in charge of the direction of conversation, is that his bench of staid platitudes and political cliches is extremely limited. He’s not able to think on his feet, and his efforts to turn things back to his talking points appear clumsier and more obvious than other candidates because he has to move so much further.

The best example that is easy to grab, and this is actually one he repeated in the debates and has more or less stuck to since, is how he turns race issues back to economic issues. Sanders said, in so many words, “We can talk about it as a racial issue, but it’s a general economic issue”. He said this during Black Lives Matter. He’s stuck to this basic line for years since. (I’ll come back to why this is particularly something that sticks in my craw, too.)

It's not like they actually ever say anything about policy, other than the broad strokes stuff that everyone already knew anyway.

And Sanders can’t even broad strokes a large array of policy.

It makes them all look like a bunch of phony morons.

Phony, yes. Morons, usually not.

And from where I stand I find it hard to put much faith in what you say about him because your hatred of him borders on the irrational

I think his stupidity is pretty obvious. And I singled him out because FaxModem said putting him up against Biden would be good for him. I don’t think that’s the case because I think he’s stupid, so I commented on it.

(again, I'm really not trying to troll you or defend Sanders specifically, I'm lukewarm on him as a candidate at best, but it just really seems sometimes like he ran over your puppy or something).

That thing about his dismissal of race as important is one of the thing that makes me hate him as much as I do. We can argue endlessly about whether Sanders took general election voters from Clinton, and I’ve been in those arguments and don’t care to repeat them because they go nowhere.

What Sanders did do, unarguably, is plant a seed in a lot of minds on the left that still plays out to this day in the endless parade of Beto/Buttigieg unremarkable handsome white guys. The idea, which he holds firmly, that race and systemic racism is a secondary issue to economic injustice that will just resolve itself upon building the economic utopia he envisions.

Trump’s whole line was “Yeah I’m a racist it I’ll work for the little guy”, and I believe (though I don’t know how you’d measure it) that Bernie’s seeding of race not being so important allowed a lot of people to see Trump as less dangerous than he has turned out to be. At least the kind of voters who don’t show up reliably who would otherwise vote Democratic. Essentially making it easier to “both sides” the least both sides election in the modern era.

And he’s demonstrated a willingness to crater the party by campaigning the way he did after the decision was made. I don’t suspect he’s lost that willingness, so my hatred of him is more or less my hatred of a coiled snake that my trailmates insist is our friend and that we should tame and turn into a mascot.

[FaxModem1]

See, when it comes to Sanders and Biden being in the same room together, they're both old white guys who can come off as not knowing what they're saying at times. Difference is, Sanders has a reputation as being much more progressive, which will distinguish him in comparison, while Biden has a very centrist reputation, which will not favor him in the primaries. Biden is also rather infamous for putting his foot in his mouth on several occasions. Sanders may stick to what he knows, and turn the debate that way, but it's a more solid strategy than making a gaffe on live TV.

Of course, gaffes on live TV aren't as big a thing as they used to be, see the current resident at 1600 Pennsylvania for example.

[The Romulan Republic]

And he’s demonstrated a willingness to crater the party by campaigning the way he did after the decision was made. I don’t suspect he’s lost that willingness, so my hatred of him is more or less my hatred of a coiled snake that my trailmates insist is our friend and that we should tame and turn into a mascot.

This at least I emphatically disagree with. Bernie stayed in longer than a lot of Clinton supporters wanted him to, but by doing so he got significant concessions on the Democratic platform, and I don't believe for a moment that you can honestly subscribe ultimate entire outcome of the 2016 election to his decision to do so. When it was done, he endorsed Hillary (and was branded a traitor and sell-out by some of his more rabid "supporters" for doing so), and campaigned for Clinton. And since the Clinton camp was pretty much arguing "Bernie can't win, he should just drop out" from the start of the primary voting, I'm not terribly sympathetic to this argument.

To be clear, this isn't me trying to say Sanders is faultless. There are plenty of things one can fairly criticize Sanders on, perhaps the most important being his tendency to get tunnel vision and focus on his economic issues at the expense of other issues, and his soft ball approach towards certain aspects of resisting Trumpism (like his foot-dragging on supporting impeachment), likely because he thinks he can win over a lot of Trumpers. In fact, I'd rather he hadn't run this time, because Warren is turning out to be the stronger progressive candidate, she got in first, and Bernie and Warren are splitting the progressive vote right now, increasing the chances of a Biden nomination. I just don't think that this particular accusation is a fair one.

[FireNexus]

Yeah, I know how you feel, Rommy. We’ve been over it. You know where the two of us arguing about it leads, so why would you bother? I’ll say a thing, you’ll say a thing, it’ll go nowhere except that I’ll have to spend forty-five minutes writing rebuttals I’ve already written at least three times over the past three years.

I gave my opinion in response to a direct question by Not You. You do not have to respond and turn this into me and you again. Nobody gains from it.

[The Romulan Republic]

Yeah, I know how you feel, Rommy. We’ve been over it. You know where the two of us arguing about it leads, so why would you bother? I’ll say a thing, you’ll say a thing, it’ll go nowhere except that I’ll have to spend forty-five minutes writing rebuttals I’ve already written at least three times over the past three years.

I gave my opinion in response to a direct question by Not You. You do not have to respond and turn this into me and you again. Nobody gains from it.

I certainly have no wish to rehash the entire 2016 primary yet again, although I must point out that if you bring up a topic on a discussion forum, you can expect people to respond to your posts, and responding by basically telling them to shut up when you're the one who raised the topic in the first place does not reflect well on you. You're the one who opted to bring up Why Sanders Sucks: Part 5,342, not me. I've made my view quite clear, repeatedly, that I think rehashing every grudge and partisan line from the 2016 primary, on either side, serves no one but Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. You don't see me putting up anti-Hillary tracts. I'd much rather focus on why Elizabeth Warren should kick both Biden and Sanders' old white male asses.