I make it a point not to discuss my position on 9/11 because the entire debate is rhetorical poison.
It’s like a land mine for your credibility. I step over it.
The result is the same either way. Assume for a second it was as they say an inside job. Or assume it’s the other extreme, exactly like the official story. Same result. Same tragic deaths. Same insane policy. Same wasted opportunities.
It’s the modern JFK. The results will be much the same. No matter what really happened, no amount of likely evidence will convince either side to switch sides.
If it was an inside job all proof of it is gone by now. If it wasn’t, no amount of what’s left will convince the opposition. The smoking gun is paperclips by now.
Honestly even the death toll isn’t relevant when you step back. How many civilians did the American military kill last year? The drug war? Treatable illness? Hunger? Etc.
What would proving it and having a massive public trial that turns out exactly as they want actually accomplish? How likely is the best possible outcome? Will it ever be worth 3000 lives? Is that even possible?
I just think the whole thing is worse than pointless. I think we can go back once we can afford to. The time to do something meaningful in any but the historical context is over.
Clearly it’s a massively significant historical event and thus is worthy of study, but the fact is there’s a reason why we basically leave that study to people bent on self-marginalizing.
Even if they are right and the goal is noble, there are more pressing issues.
Every one ethical and sane already all basically agrees the war on terror is a human rights catastrophe, the war in Iraq a gargantuan mistake, a decade and a half of hard experience has taught us the folly of this path and the informed are already committed to changing it, for the most part.
We manufactured Osama and we manufactured ISIS, and either they engineered 9/11 or they ruthlessly exploited it, and either way they are responsible for an unfathomable number of deaths, plus or minus 3000.
The best thing to do now is avoid all such things in the future as best we can and oppose any logic which dismisses the suffering and death of others.
Because Bernie Sanders I see a lot of bullshit about China coming out of the right wing types these days.
It’s a republican wet dream as far as I know. There’s like no real social safety nets, there’s no real environmental regulation, nothing like an actual minimum wage, nothing like real privacy protection, a de facto slave trade, obsessive cultural worship of the past, no unions, no real justice system just a lot of arbitrary executions and censorship and militarized police, huge and belligerent actual military, institutionalized sexism, it’s financial systems are a deregulated bubble factories thick with corruption and insider trading, the list is endless. Not to mention they are the direct or indirect obvious beneficiaries of every trade pact on the planet. Trade pacts which the right wing ADORE.
It’s like if Fox news ran a country. China seems the end product of libertarianism. Socialism for the corporations and oligarchs, and heartless individualism for everyone else. Which is exactly what all right wing policy demands. That’s the entire point of starve the beast, since Reagan.
Literally the only difference between China and a theoretical right wing utopia is no government enforced Christianity, and maybe a few differences of label. Functionally they seem nearly identical to me.
The very term libertarian BEGAN as a corporatist lie. A philosophy tailor made to justify pro business regulation and deregulation. And isn’t that what China is now? Just a massive corporation with a bunch of wholly owned subsidiaries with the entire populace in the role of employees?
Every dollar in Bernie Sanders’s proposals is matched by a corresponding dollar raised in revenue — it’s all accounted for.
For example, the $75 billion/year College For All plan will be paid for by a tax on Wall Street speculation, while the $100 billion/year Rebuild America Act will be paid for by taxing corporate offshore income.
Socialists will ban private property!
Bernie Sanders is a DEMOCRATIC socialist. He believes that our current economic system isn’t doing enough for poor and middle-class Americans and that democratic change is needed to create a more fair and just America.
But this isn’t radical or scary! Many of the programs instituted by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson that we take for granted today — such as Medicare, the 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, and Social Security — can be considered socialist programs.
He’ll tax us all into homelessness!
If you’re one of the 1.5% of Americans making more than $231,450 a year, your marginal tax rate will go up slightly — money you earn above $231,450 will be taxed at 37% instead of 33%.
If you’re one of the 0.6% of Americans making more than $500,000 a year, your marginal rate will go up from 39.6% to 43%. Above $2,000,000 the rate will be 48%, and above $10,000,000 the rate will be 52%. These are tax increases that will only affect the very, very wealthy.
On the other hand, the vast majority of Americans will see significant savings when factoring in tax and healthcare changes under Bernie’s plans.
He’d never win vs the republicans!
Bernie has a better chance in the general election than Hillary would have:
Bernie performs better than Hillary does in all hypothetical match-ups against Republicans in poll after poll (2.4% better against Trump, 4.6% better against Cruz, and 1.5% better against Rubio, on average).
Bernie significantly outperforms Hillary in surveys of independent voters, and with 30-40% of Americans identifying as independents, they will play the deciding role in the general election.
And Bernie has a big lead in favorability, with a +10% net favorability rating among all Americans, compared to Hillary’s -10% net favorability rating. No presidential candidate has ever won with a negative favorability rating.
Republican controlled congress won’t let him do anything!
Bernie is actually well-known for his ability to compromise to get things done without sacrificing his values. In the House, he was known as the Amendment King, and passed more amendments, addressing exclusively progressive goals, than any other legislator, by forging cross-party coalitions.
He has earned respect from Republicans ranging from John McCain to the ultra-conservative Jim Inhofe. If any Democratic president can reach across the aisle to work with a stubborn Republican Congress, it’s Bernie Sanders.
Bernie wants to expand health care coverage, not get rid of it!
Obamacare has made things a lot better, but it’s only a step in the right direction: Americans are still paying more for healthcare than any other country, and more than 10% of us still don’t have health insurance.
Bernie’s Medicare-for-all proposal will do just what it says — provide coverage for every American citizen, while saving the average American family $2000—$4000 per year.
This will likely be my last update. Everything below this update I leave for the historical record.
Bernie betrayed us. He had no intention of fighting at the convention.
He will not run third party.
Trump or Hillary will be president.
This is not a democracy.
#ExitPollGate
At least I can take pride in the voters even if the election was rigged.
[poll id=”4″]
Tools:
https://ridewithbernie.com/#/
http://ea.rthbound.com/nudge/ (Now canceled because god forbid super delegates with their 10,000 votes should be held to account for being literal official oligarchs.)
voteforbernie.org
https://www.berniepb.com/
www.bernkit.com
Note:
This issue is very closely linked with the issue of Clinton’s electability and many articles touch on both sets of points.
And although this isn’t meant to get anyone to switch their support from Hillary to Bernie, I’m hoping that it clears some misconceptions about Bernie supporters and their hesitance with supporting Hillary Clinton if she is the nominee. We can have a conversation after, but the reason we haven’t been able to up to this point is because the election fraud part hasn’t been acknowledged or taken seriously. We’re even told that it didn’t happen.
In short, it isn’t precisely clear why Sanders opted to endorse Clinton weeks before the convention without suspending his campaign. Many Sanders supporters maintained that the DNC or Clinton campaign threatened to rescind platform promises had Sanders not endorsed, but the senator made no such claim himself in a 12 July 2016 delegate conference call. During that call, Sanders did urge all delegates to appear in Philadelphia and vote for him on the first ballot.
As for claims that Sanders (like FDR before him) was heading into a contested convention after endorsing a rival, there was scant truth to that claim. FDR headed into the convention with a majority of pledged delegates, prior to the advent of superdelegates. While FDR needed a hard-won two-thirds majority to seize his nomination, he also started with more delegates than his competitors. And the process of formally endorsing a rival didn’t appear to be exceptionally relevant (if at all common) in the 1932 presidential nominating process.
Sanders leaving the door open to a Sanders-Stein ticket comes at a time when polls show unprecedented support for a candidate to challenge Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. This week NBC found that 47% of voters would consider a third-party candidate if Clinton and Trump were the major-party nominees. In the last week, two other polls found a large minority will vote for a third party this year. Schoen Consulting found 20% of voters would vote for a third party against Clinton and Trump with 14% undecided; Data Targeting Inc. found 21% would do so with 14% undecided.
Extreme? No. A Hillary nomination moves the General into Mondale or Dukakis territory (see Appendix at bottom). Polls consistently show Hillary’s Unfavorable rating exceeding 50% and she is seen as dishonest and untrustworthy by 61% of Americans–that’s greater than Trump, Hillary starts the race from behind, name-recognition her only asset, and with undecideds on her in single-digits, she has no path to victory.
But why the near landslide loss? It’s a perfect storm, led by the nation’s mood. Over two-thirds think we are on the wrong track. People want change. Hillary is The Establishment politics-as-usual candidate in an election cycle where a significant portion of the American electorate is demanding change. Hillary turns off every American wanting change which includes significant portions of the Democratic base. If Hillary is the nominee, there will be record low turnout from traditional Democratic constituencies like students, labor unions, and minorities. She will get little support from Progressives many of whom will, if they vote at all, vote Green. Among independents, Hillary is viewed unfavorably by a large majority (net -27 in the latest poll), and she strongly motivates the Republican base to vote to defeat her–Conservatives hate her even more than they hate Obama. A Hillary nomination guarantees Republican victory.
If you have not already taken the #BernieOrBust pledge, please do so by clicking below. If you have already taken it, now is when we need to build this movement faster than ever. Bernie, down ~300 pledged delegates, really needs a miracle. Please find two of the 30% of Bernie’s supporters, who will not vote for Clinton according to a recent poll, and ask them to take the pledge. You can send them to http://BernieorBust.org to take it. This #leverage is his best hope in our view.
The people of this movement have come to the realization that our current system is broken beyond repair and the time for incremental change is over. This is worth repeating. The system under no circumstances can be fixed with establishment politics; it can only be fixed by a progressive political revolution that sends a message loud and clear that we the people are setting a new standard for our elected representatives.
Bernie Sanders understands the urgency to navigate our way out the whirlpool of injustice and impending disasters that inevitably await us and he has a voting record that proves he has the wisdom required to make the right decisions for the country.
The first order of business in that regard is to make anti-austerity politics succeed. This makes perfect sense – because if anything radically better is to come onto the agenda in the foreseeable future, quashing neoliberalism is an indispensable first step.
Small wonder then that there is enough fervor in the Bernie camp that Clinton’s publicists, and the media hacks that serve them, are now warning that, like the Republicans, the Democrats could splinter apart, thanks to Bernie’s refusal to turn his operation over to the Clinton machine. If only this were true!
[NOTE: This is a long piece! If you want to read or print it out in pdf form, you can find it right here and download it to your computer and read at your convenience.]
But time is short and the stakes are high, and I want to focus on a pattern of her claiming to be a progressive Democrat while taking positions that are too often more closely aligned with the other side of the aisle, and on a record that I worry makes her a real longshot if she’s our nominee.
Some people say Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are approximately the same on the issues. These people likely have a lifestyle and a level of income that is comfortable and that they’re not too worried about losing. For middle class and working class people, many of whom struggle from paycheck to paycheck and carry debt, the policies proposed by the two candidates are nothing alike.
From these large amounts of money being transferred from state coffers to the Hillary Victory Fund in Washington, the Clinton campaign got the first $2,700, the DNC was to get the next $33,400, and the remainder was to be split among the 33 signatory states. With this scheme, the Hillary Victory Fund raised over $26 million for the Clinton Campaign by the end of 2015.
“It’s dangerous to think we can continue the way we are with the militarized police force, with the death penalty and the low minimum wage and threats to women’s rights and think you can’t do something huge to turn that around. The country is not in good shape if you’re in the middle class. It’s disappearing,” Sarandon said Monday night on MSNBC.
Gitmo remains open, American troops are still in Afghanistan, the criminals that engineered the financial crisis are at large, and race relations have deteriorated rather than improved. Now Sanders supporters hear Hillary Clinton promising to continue wherever Barack Obama leaves off, and they wonder what the point of four more years of the same would be in an increasingly desperate country and, indeed, world.
Both Clinton and party leaders are making a mockery of many of the principles the party is supposed to stand for. And pledging to support Clinton in the end – no matter what she and the DNC do – enables this kind of behavior. It’s hard for me to see how we will ever fix our political process and reclaim our democracy by refusing to draw some lines in the sand.
The Bernie or bust pledge, an idea initiated by Revolt Against Plutocracy last June, commits pledge-takers to either write in Bernie Sanders or vote for the Green Party candidate in the general election if Bernie is not the nominee. After reaching 50,000 pledges in late February, the story was picked up by the Washington Times on March 1st. Fox News and CNN asked for interviews, but only Fox has found the time in the last two weeks to cover the story. MSNBC refuses to mention the movement. So much for their “liberal bias.” CNN already has the reputation as the Clinton News Network. Perhaps its time for progressives to recognize MSNBClinton as well.
Sanders’ win is a good thing for Democrats because he is the only candidate who can unite the party in November. There is no way economic progressives and Bernie supporters will accept a Hillary Clinton nomination after everything they’ve seen in this primary.
Every other country in the world or in Latin America was demanding the restitution of democracy and the return of Manuel Zelaya. It was Clinton who basically relegated that to a secondary concern and insisted on elections, which had the effect of legitimizing and routinizing the coup regime and creating the nightmare scenario that exists today.
While many, if not virtually all of Bernie Sanders’ supporters want a woman as president someday, the people who believe the U.S. “needs” a female president are those who have the greatest requirement to understand our corrupted, rigged system of government. While many citizens want a female president, the United States needs a political revolution.
If Clinton had done anything other than endorsed the deal, she would have created a major headache for herself. Even so, her speech about the deal highlighted what ought to be–but probably won’t be–a deeply examined part of her ideology: her hyper-hawkishness.
For the 2016 election, with the electorate in a restive mood, Clinton has gone back to the populist well. Her rhetoric is more left wing than last time. She talks about paid family leave and increasing Social Security and the minimum wage, all welcome developments. Yet there is little substance behind the speechifying.
When I think of Hillary Clinton offering her eloquent ode yesterday to Nancy Reagan for the late first lady’s supposed “very effective, low key [AIDS] advocacy” — thereby not only ignoring the horrible, evil truth of what happened but actually rewriting history and casting Reagan as some kind of hero, I am absolutely furious and I don’t know what to do with myself.
Were Clinton to take office, would she seriously push for greater economic fairness, more peace and a generally progressive agenda, or would she defend the status quo?To answer this, let’s look first at our context. Strange things are happening. Establishment neoconservatives seem to be gravitating toward Clinton as an anti-Trump
But when you look at the positions she has taken on some of the most significant public policy questions of her time, you cannot escape noticing one key pattern: She has always embraced the politically popular stand—indeed, she has gone out of her way to reinforce that stand—and she has shifted her ground in a way that perfectly correlates with the shifts in public opinion.
The real takeaway, however, is that 33% of Sanders supporters say that they “Could not see themselves supporting Clinton” in the general election. Additionally, 32% describe themselves as having “a negative view of Clinton.”
“We want Hillary Clinton to win. She is telling everybody one thing, but she has a hidden agenda,” Quigg, a grand dragon of the KKK’s California chapter who is responsible for recruitment across the Western United States, told the Telegraph.
Firstly, as I describe in the meme above, the price of Hillary is death for the entire concept of a progressive party in America.
People are assuming Trump would be worst based on habit and hyperbole.
1. Democrat is not automatically better than republican when both Trump and HRC are only wearing the labels for expediency.
2. Trump will not be allowed to be Hitler 2.0. We aren’t electing an Emperor and we are the most heavily armed public of any major nation.
He may want to be Hitler, or even try. He would be quickly stopped one way or another.
After you get past those two facts and start looking at HRC vs Trump, vs what you don’t know about Trump and what you know for a fact about HRC, also once you look at the consequences of rewarding an overt neoliberal with the presidency, Trump vs HRC becomes a no brainer.
It’s not what you think. HRC is WAY more dangerous than that orange buffoon.
But even if it wasn’t that dire, still I would not be voting for Hillary if she steals “wins” the democratic primary.
A knife in the back is worse than a sword on your shield. Period.
Many have argued that Bernie would be a qualitatively establishment president, and that Hillary would be preferable to Trump or Cruz. But we already tested that theory in 2008, and I do not like the outcome.
Calling any president establishment is a baseless assertion unless you expand the definition of establishment to such a broad degree that it’s semantically null.
We haven’t seen a progressive president in the modern era. The last one we had was Carter. The last one like Bernie was FDR.
Also, the covert republican logic applies to the SCOTUS as well. Just look at Obama’s SCOTUS appointment. I’d rather have it publicly understood that we have a corrupt right wing court than the illusion of a progressive one. Because then we could agitate collectively in a useful direction, as opposed to wasting time trying to reason with a covert partisan.
I voted for Obama the second time because of appointment anxiety. But again, I dislike the outcome. We ended up with a right wing SCOTUS anyway. Compare their rulings with the desires of the chamber of commerce. And yet where is the organized left wing protest? Absent because of the assumption that Obama is on our side because he’s black and because he wears the D and because he campaigned like Bernie.
If we truly know on the other hand that the SCOTUS and the administration are both right wing and corrupt then our efforts can be properly focused on taking back the whitehouse and obstructing everything they do in congress and lower courts. As we clearly would Vs Trump.
If we get a right wing all three, then it becomes a matter of taking back both congress and the whitehouse or forcing them to show their hand as a totalitarian state at which point other options need be explored.
In all cases the enemy you can see is preferable to a traitor you cannot. Hillary would get the Obama apologist treatment, as is proven by the HRC camp right now. They are positively eager to make excuses for her blatantly conservative career. And thus were she elected, the country would further drag to the right anyway, but without meaningful resistance.
Bernie on the other hand, is in all senses an activist. Electing him will basically be the first step of a bloodless coup designed to topple an oligarchy. Compromise is no longer acceptable.
Look at what is on the table.
Trump is literally turning into Hitler. I’m not even exaggerating. He would be a lame ineffectual Hitler thank the gods, but that’s what he wants, and there’s always the slim slim chance he’ll get it. And then there’s global warming Hillary will make worse, then there’s the TPP she’ll instantly find an excuse to back, continued mass incarceration which she and her husband invented, and a global bank collapse she’ll profit from, and the 2nd great depression that won’t impact her.
Look at the historical analogs. We’re risking a literal second holocaust, the literal end of the food chain, a literal global environmental collapse, and possibly WW3 if she pisses off Russia bad enough in Syria, etc.
I am not even kidding about any of that. Granted it’s not all likely, but it is very clearly on the table.
Hillary and Trump terrify me. But Hillary an order of magnitude more so. That’s why I’m #BernieOrBust because I’d rather have an earlier shot at changing course than smoother sailing in the mean time.
Electing Hillary might be better for a very short while, but it would be like how Obamacare killed single payer only with the entire concept of progressivism in the United States. I would rather we had suffered another four years of nothing followed by single payer, than 8 years of Obamacare.
I’m playing the long game. And so should you unless you’re 90 years old and childless.
Update 2016-03-20 0404 AM: The Dark Truth About Many Democrats
I’ve come to realize something.
The hate of #BernieOrBust voters shows that something sinister lies behind much of the the lesser of two evils voting. An excuse.
HRC followers I think are not in fact immune to evidence. I think southern voters are not as suppressed as our benefit of the doubt would imply. They are simply closet republicans.
Secretly they love the wars, the shootings, the rape, the executions, the poisoned children, the slaves, the urban decay, the crushing squalor, the torture, the despair, the opulence, the dystopian future, the smog, the toil, the disease, the ascension fantasy, the rigid hierarchy, the shared flattering lies, the mockery, the scorn, the false humility, the condescension, the caste system. And above all, the excuses for them.
I think there is some Stanford prison experiment stuff going on here. Some fight or flight or appease response.
They shake their heads and tut, but inside they are elated. Like the apple tossing peasants of the public execution era and the colosseum.
They just prefer to pretend their hand is forced. They are sadists hiding behind duty. And so they call themselves progressive and pretend they don’t see. They hide behind the lies and “compromise” further and further dark. Because in the words of the TV, they don’t want to end the exploitation, they want to become the exploiters.
They are horrified by the thought of actual progressive political victory. Of the game finally being fair with no brutal punishments for the losers.
So they violently defend a totalitarian warmongering psychopath and pretend this defense is evasion of a pathological lying narcissist that excuses them. But like the man said, being against evil doesn’t make you good. We need to admit there is evil in our camp.
These people don’t have the ethical fortitude for an equitable and humane future. And so they pretend to be bamboozled. They vote against their own interests, and waggle their fingers with one hand and fondle their genitals with the other.
It is not ignorance we battle. It is evil. Evil I define here as the natural inclination to derive joy from the true suffering of others, and this inclination being allowed to define personal policy. A form of a person’s nature that is simply malevolent.
As I said, being against evil doesn’t make you good, so hating and hurting these people is not the solution. But neither is converting them. You can’t talk a fish out of water. The solution is to simply out flank them. To prove that democracy is wisdom by out voting both the overtly and covertly evil. Admit that conversion is impossible. Simply dismiss them. And look elsewhere for those of our kind. The utilitarians. The undiscovered social democrats. To find them and show them the opportunity they have.
The young are the key. We must convince them to actually vote. The time is now.
TYT, It sounds to me like you are complaining about bishops being interviewed for the job of pope, on the grounds that they are not being harassed about being religious. A town hall isn’t the place for that. You guys are missing the point of a right wing town hall.
The right wing mutilates the crap out of itself on terms it can understand during debates. Why would right wing audiences want to see the same in the town hall? Softball is the only way right wing voters get to see an example of them being given everything they want without direct personal opposition. Which is what they would get as president.
Think about it, no one ever really got in Bush’s face while he was president. Because he was the freaking president. Softball questions are actually a pretty great way to preview what each candidate as president would look like.
Also you guys are talking like it’s the media’s job to basically interrogate the right about why they are right wing generally, and that’s fair out in the world in the context of problem solving, but that’s unfair in the context of a town hall given that in other contexts you accept the existence of the right wing.
You never for example overtly and seriously argue that the right wing should be banned. You never overtly argue for a one party system. Think about what that means. It by definition means that you agree that the existence of the right wing is legitimate, in which case you must also grant it is legitimate for it to explore itself in some contexts unchallenged. This is one of those contexts.
Everyone knows everything there is to know about the right wing. These candidates are virtual clones of each other. There’s no new information to extract from them from either side. Just like everyone knows that those bishops all believe the same things, we know all these regressives believe the same things, wrong or not.
The function of the press as a watchdog is to challenge them on this stuff, true, which they don’t, but a town hall is supposed to be partisan friendly. This is actually like the one place where where softballs kind of are fair play.
Now, you cry but what about the left getting hardballs, how is that fair? Well it’s fair because that’s what the left wants. Progressives have a lot bigger decision to make intrinsically when choosing a direction and a leader.
This is about the fundamental difference between conservation and progress. There’s only one past, but there are many possible futures. Wanting to regress is a unidirectional goal, but wanting to make progress is an infinitely more complicated hypothetical because you can go in any direction except back.
This town hall is exactly what was expected, exactly what it should be, and that’s why I didn’t watch it.
TYT seems to understand this when they comment on the fear of being called liberal media. That’s exactly what the media are afraid of because that’s exactly what it would be if they were to ask hard (IE, how dare you be right wing) questions, in the context of a town hall.
The time to ask them that sort of question is out in the real world when their policies fail. That’s the kind of question you ambush them with while they are getting off a bus or otherwise have them cornered. Like if you catch them drinking some water you ask them how they’d feel if you told them deregulation put lead in it.
Even TYT must realize fairness isn’t it’s actual goal. Yes you are saying ask both hardball questions, but that’s what you want them to do. That’s even but it’s not fair. You’re asking to get your way in both cases, but another form of fair is to not get your way in both cases. Would you rather the left get softball questions too in the context of debates and town halls? Of course not. Because that’s not the function of a town hall for the left wing.
Realize. This is what the right wing wants and expects from partisan contexts that already agree with them. It is not what the left wing wants and expects. The right in these contexts wants easy mode, the left wants to be challenged. Conversely, in a left wing debate everyone in civil, in a right wing debate they tear eachother’s throats out. The media is right wing biased, no question, but this softball town hall is not in my opinion an example of it.
