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- Tulsi Gabbard is now consistently polling in the same range as Cory Booker & Beto O’Rourke without having nowhere near as much media coverage as those two. With fair media coverage, Tulsi can definitely break in the top 5. #TULSI2020 #TULSIPOLL
Today, NPR's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED spoke with progressives who do not want Joe Biden and don't believe he can win. I agree with them. I also enjoyed a weekend ALL THINGS CONSIDERED report on the Volkswagen Bug. Here's a taste:
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Now we'd like to take a few minutes to remember an automotive icon. This week, the last Volkswagen Beetle rolled off the assembly line in Puebla, Mexico. The car, beloved as it has become, actually has a complicated history. The original idea was formulated by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, who wanted a people's car, a Volkswagen. But the car wasn't actually produced for civilians until the late 1940s, when the victorious Allies wanted to get Germany's economy going again. Multiple rebrands later, a hipster favorite was born.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: It's ugly, but it gets you there.
MARTIN: With all the other small car options on the market now, we wondered if the quirky bug will be missed. So we asked you to tell us your favorite Beetle memories, and you did. More than 900 people wrote us, including Kristine Smith. She got a robin's-egg-blue Beetle convertible when she was 16.
KRISTINE SMITH: It really felt like a mascot or like a family pet to me. So it was a really hard decision and when I sold the car because I did feel like I was giving my dog away or something.
MARTIN: A lot of you wanted to tell us about the Beetle's durability or the lack thereof. We're still wondering why so many of you had to use an ice scraper on the inside of the windshield. And then, there was this other thing. Robert Rillo remembers driving to a concert one summer with his sister and her friend and having to wait hours in the Oklahoma heat to park.
ROBERT RILLO: And as we were sitting there, he goes, you know, man, it sure is getting hot in here. And we thought, yeah, it's just hot. Then a few seconds later, he's like it's getting really hot in here. And then, a second or two later, he jumped up, and smoke was kind of coming out from underneath the seat.
MARTIN: The battery was on fire. They managed to put out the fire, go to the concert and see Huey Lewis and the News. But they missed the opener, Stevie Ray Vaughan.
RILLO: That was tragic (laughter).
MARTIN: We were so sorry to hear that. So here you go, Robert. This one's for you.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PRIDE AND JOY")
STEVIE RAY VAUGHAN: (Singing) She my sweet little thing. She my pride and joy.
MARTIN: But everybody who wrote us forgave the Beetle's quirks. Kelly Moors certainly did. She says that in 1976, quote, "I was 16. My boyfriend was 17. He was handsome and sweet and drove a VW Beetle. I loved them both. He taught me to drive it, stick shift and all. He also taught me to kiss in it. It was a lovely summer." You go, Kelly. And she was not the only one to find love.
Here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
Monday, July 15, 2019. Joe Biden tries a new excuse for his selling of
the Iraq War "I'm actually dumber than the Village Idiot," and much
more.
Let's start with Senator Tammy Duckworth.
Let's start with Senator Tammy Duckworth.
It’s a national tragedy when our troops have to worry if their families will have enough to eat & their kids will go to bed hungry.
I’m glad @TODAYshow highlighted this critical issue + the legislation @RepSusanDavis & I introduced to prevent military families from going hungry.
Really, Tammy? That's where you draw the line for children? If their parents are serving? So it's not a national tragedy when an American child doesn't have enough to eat or they go to bed hungry if their parents are in the US military?
That's part of the nonsense that has built up since 9/11 as each person tries to make it clear that they support the military even more than the other person does.
It's crap.
Every American child should be fed -- regardless of their parents job. No child in this country should go to bed hungry.
And if Tammy's unable to embrace all of America's children, here's something she might want to consider: You don't know which of these children will later end up in the military. Oh, my goodness, Tammy, you might, right now at this minute, be spitting on future troops!
Again, there's no excuse for any American child -- or any child in America -- to go hungry. There's no excuse for it. That's it.
It's like our homeless problem. It exists and it goes beyond troops although that's all anyone in Congress wants to focus on. We have a homeless problem in America. It's a serious problem and no one should be homeless.
I'm all for veterans getting what they have been promised and I've long advocated for that here.
But we don't have a two-tier system of citizenship. We are a democracy where every person is supposed to be equal.
So Tammy's decision to fret over hungry children only if their parents are in the military suggest that possibly she should leave the US Congress -- which is supposed to represent We The People -- and move over to a VSO where her concerns might be more appropriately addressed.
The only good thing about the current election cycle is that Tammy didn't throw her hat in the ring. But 25 people are seeing the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. Including? Former Vice President and former US Senator Joe Biden.
The always ridiculous Fred Kaplan of SLATE has drawn chuckles again by insisting that Joe Biden is the only candidate in the race with foreign policy experience when Joe's only foreign policy experience has been promoting and voting for war over and over again.
Joe was not Secretary of State. That was Hillary Clinton and the John Kerry. Joe has no real foreign policy experience to brag of.
Just a reminder: Joe Biden was a leading Democratic voice in favor of war in Iraq, it was he who laid the groundwork for Bush's invasion! We would have no peace if he's our President!
- Joe Biden Says He's Ready To Handle The World. He Got Iraq Wrong Three Times. |
#JoeBiden has a long record of being on the wrong side of #history, including his vote in favor of #GeorgeWBush's #Iraq war & support for #ApartheidIsrael's #ethniccleansing of the #indigenous people of #Palestine & pursuit of #genocide in #Gaza; #NoBiden
pbs.org/newshour/polit…
As chairmen of the Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden relentlessly promoted the Iraq War. A cheerleader for one of the worst foreign policy blunders in U.S. history should not be POTUS. @BernieSanders opposed the war from the beginning. #Bernie2020
\Over the weekend, Joe saw the opportunity to promote his 'expertise' by offering yet another attempt to weasel out of his vote for the Iraq War and his selling of it before it began as well as afterwards.
Joe Biden on his vote for the Iraq war: The "mistake I made was trusting" former President George W. Bush
0:08 / 0:19
The "mistake I made was trusting" Bully Boy Bush. That's the best Joe can offer.
It's a lie but if he wants us to believe him, okay, let's play.
Joe wants to be president. But on one of the most important decisions of this century, he got it wrong, he says, because he trusted Bully Boy Bush.
Now the younger among us may not remember but Bully Boy Bush was not seen as the brightest bulb. In fact, he was seen as the Village Idiot.
So Joe's justification currently is that he should be president even though he's so stupid that a Village Idiot managed to trick him.
That doesn't speak well to Joe -- not to his character, not his sense of judgment.
"Status Quo Joe" is the latest nickname the War Hawk's received.
Today, Joe's expected to deliver (as his campaign has whispered all weekend) remarks that will call for ObamaCare to stay and reject Medicare For All.
- David Sirota Retweeted
A reminder that opponents of Medicare for All are trying to preserve, protect and defend a system that produces this 
Various fakes and phonies -- hey, Clara Jeffrey, we're looking at you -- insist that everything needs to be cute and cuddly. Their "Hey, guys, we have to defeat Trump" is a lot like the spirit bunny speech Kelli Maroney's Cindy gave in FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH.
This isn't a game.
We have children going hungry in this country. We have homeless people in every state. We have never-ending wars. Medicare For All is a basic right. ObamaCare was a loser when Mitt Romney first sold it as RomneyCare.
A couple of years ago, Joe Biden was vice president and now he wants to be president but the best he can offer is ObamaCare? Oh and he'll "seek" a public option.
Didn't he and Barack promise a public option while running in the 2008 general election? Yes, they did.
Not to seek it, they promised to provide it.
Eleven years later, Weak Ass Joe can't even promise that. He can only promise to "seek" it.
It's the vision thing -- he has none.
In the intensifying debate over Medicare for All, I don't think there's been enough focus on the fact that the very *first* thing Joe Biden did to launch his presidential campaign was hold a fundraiser with the CEO of a giant health insurance company. theintercept.com/2019/04/25/joe…
Again, to those clutching the pearls and insisting we all be genteel, this isn't pie in the sky. This is about the country's future and -- sorry, Joe -- our future isn't our past.
As Joe makes an idiot of himself over healthcare, he can take comfort in the fact that it may distract from yet another lie of his being exposed.
NEW: Biden's opposition to busing was far more sweeping than he has led voters to believe. @asteadwesley and I took a deep dive into his record. He fought the court that forced Wilmington schools to desegregate.
"We want to end court-ordered busing." nyti.ms/2XHEPcU
From Astead W. Herndon and Sheryl Gay Stolberg's report:
In the two weeks since Senator Kamala Harris of California, a rival for the nomination, invoked her own story of being bused to school to forcefully challenge Mr. Biden during the first Democratic presidential debates — and on the heels of criticism of his work with segregationists on crime legislation — Mr. Biden’s standing has dropped among the Democratic electorate, and his status as the race’s early front-runner is freshly threatened as his polling lead among black voters softens.
[. . .]
Mr. Biden has said that his record on school desegregation has been misrepresented, and he maintains that he supported busing as a remedy for the intentionally discriminatory policies that kept white and black students in separate schools in the South — a position his campaign spokesman, Andrew Bates, reaffirmed on Sunday in a statement to The Times. But a review of hundreds of pages of congressional records, as well as interviews with education experts and Biden contemporaries in Wilmington and Washington, suggests that his opposition to busing was far more sweeping than he has led voters to believe.
“I don’t know whether he’s just reconstructed this history in his own
mind, but he’s factually untruthful, that’s for sure,” said Gary Orfield, a California professor who has written extensively about school desegregation, including in Wilmington, and who testified before Mr. Biden in 1981.
He said that for politicians like Mr. Biden, the busing question was “a
real test of conscience and courage. I think he failed.”
Mr. Biden also, more than any other Northern Democrat, adopted the
language of conservatives on the issue, using terms like “forced busing”
when his fellow liberals would emphasize desegregation, not
transportation. Civil rights advocates note that students had, of
course, been riding buses to school for decades; opponents of
court-ordered busing never raised a ruckus when black children were
forced to ride buses miles away from their homes to attend
“colored-only” schools.
“I oppose busing,” Mr. Biden said in a lengthy television interviewentered into the Congressional Record in 1975. “It’s an asinine concept, the utility of which has never been proven to me.”
From 1975 until 1982, Mr. Biden — often in partnership with his fellow Delawarean, Senator William Roth, a Republican — promoted nearly a dozen pieces of legislation aimed at placing strict limits on the authority of federal agencies and the courts to
mandate busing to achieve racial integration in schools. At a time when
busing controversies were provoking racial unrest in cities like
Boston, Mr. Biden argued that housing integration — which would take
much longer to implement than a busing plan — was a far better way to
desegregate public schools.
“The new integration plans being offered are really just
quota-systems to assure a certain number of blacks, Chicanos, or
whatever in each school,” Mr. Biden told the television interviewer.
Repeating, this election is about real issues. And the notion that anyone should have to hold anything back about Joe Biden after he's had two weeks of using surrogates -- even his own wife -- to attack Kamala Harris? No, the gloves need to be off and Joe needs to stop hiding behind women's skirts.
The never-ending wars continue -- despite Joe refusing to even mention Iraq in his 'major foreign policy address' last week. These aren't games. People are dying. If you don't care about the people of Iraq and Afghanistan who continue to die, maybe you can care that another American has died in these forever wars?
Search results
This is Sgt. Maj. James G. Sartor. He was killed by small-arms fire in Afghanistan on Saturday, July 13 while deployed with 10th Special Forces Group.
Between Iraq and Afghanistan, Sartor was deployed in 2002, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2017 and 2019.
RIP.
We'll note this.
Iraq denies arrival of new batch of U.S. soldiers at military base
So Iraq's government is denying the rumor that more US troops are present. Are they? A working press might actually explore that.
They might also rebuke those Iraqi officials who've repeatedly sold the lie that residents of Mosul have willing returned in large numbers and that rebuilding is taking place.
No, it's really not.
#Iraq That’s why for 2 years nothing has been done to help Old #Mosul ‘s residents to rebuild their homes & businesses. The Governor and unidentified investors want to create a "new city" with gleaming high rises, and large supermarket & restaurant chains aljazeera.com/indepth/featur…
Let's wind down with this reality.
Iraq's penal code allows husbands to 'discipline their wives', and there is currently no law criminalising domestic violence aje.io/ngp39
Before Joe sold and supported the war on Iraq, Iraqi women had more legal rights than women in any other Middle Eastern country. Thanks to Joe, that's no longer true. This despite all the money US taxpayers has provided Iraq (and its corrupt rulers).
New content at THIRD:
- Truest statement of the week
- Truest statement of the week II
- A note to our readers
- Editorial: Why do only some opinions matter to the...
- TV: R-e-s-p-o-n-s-i-b-i-l-i-t-y
- What is this crap?
- Why we need Tulsi
- Ty's Corner
- Poor Clara, even toys confuse her
- He's always a liar to us
- Endorsement of the week
- This edition's playlist
- Some Tweets from the Green Party
- Power Up Green 2019 Green Party Annual Meeting
- Reps. Davis, Smucker, and Davids Introduce Legisla...
- South Central Michigan Greens to Meet 1-3pm Saturd...
- Highlights
The following sites updated:
