Wednesday, September 18, 2019

Why is Joe Biden so scared of Ady Barkan?

Why is he?

 3 hours ago
Mr. Vice President , you know about illness. Share your personal and powerful story like your colleagues and explain your vision of healthcare. Look a dying man in the eyes and tell me how we fix this country. We may disagree, but that's ok.
14 replies243 retweets1,176 likes
 
 




We need Medicare For All but Joe doesn't want to give it to us.  He doesn't want to help Americans.  He just wants to be the whore for Big Business.


  1.  8 hours ago
    Joe Biden claims Medicare for All would be bad for unions. GM just proved why he’s wrong.
    Did General Motors just make the case for Medicare-for-all?
    14 replies233 retweets838 likes
     
     


I believe it did.  We need Medicare For All and if Joe Biden's too much of a whore and too stupid, he needs to get the hell out of the way. 

 4 minutes ago
.’s ‘lead’ has been diminishing from the first day he entered the race—he’s never gained ground, he’s only lost it
NEW POLL: Biden lead shrinks, Sanders and Warren close gap in Democratic primary race
1 reply
 
 



He keeps dropping in the polls.  And that's just going to continue.  No one wants a President Biden.  He needs to go sit down already.

I wouldn't trust him to drive a car, I certainly wouldn't trust him to be president.


Here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"


Wednesday, September 18, 2019.  The US government continues to growl for more war, a War Whore dies and Nina Totenberg wants us to mourn the whore, Elizabeth Warren's on the rise in a new poll and much more.

Starting with the push to go to war on Iran.  Bill Van Auken (WSWS) points out:

 The threat that Washington will unleash a major new war in the Middle East continued to escalate Tuesday as US intelligence and military officials—speaking not for attribution—claimed to have established that last Saturday’s attacks on Saudi Arabian oil installations were launched from southwestern Iran.
Not a shred of evidence has been provided to substantiate this charge, and, according to Pentagon officials who spoke anonymously to National Public Radio, the evidence claimed is “circumstantial,” consisting of satellite surveillance imagery showing activity at supposed Iranian launch sites in advance of the attack on Abqaiq, the world’s largest crude oil processing facility, and the Khurais oil field, both in eastern Saudi Arabia.
Despite the failure of US authorities to make public any of their alleged evidence, the US corporate media is reporting the charge against Iran as incontrovertible fact.
Iran has denied any responsibility for the attacks, which were claimed by the Houthi rebels in Yemen as an act of retaliation for the near-genocidal war waged by Saudi Arabia against the impoverished Arab country for the past four-and-a-half years.
An unrelenting bombing campaign, waged with indispensable US supplies of arms, ammunition and logistical support, is responsible for the bulk of the nearly 100,000 Yemeni deaths in the course of the war. The Saudi attacks, combined with a blockade enforced with the aid of the US Navy, has driven some 8 million Yemenis to the brink of starvation.
The Houthis claimed to have staged the attacks with a swarm of 10 weaponized drones, weapons that they publicly unveiled last July. The strikes cut Saudi Arabia’s oil production in half, reducing it by 5.7 million barrels daily, or more than 5 percent of global crude production.


The US is involved in endless wars.  That would include Iraq, yes, and Afghanistan as well -- but it would also include so many more.  In 2014, Timothy McGrath (PRI) counted 134 wars the US was then currently involved in.  The last thing the US needs is another war.  The last thing the world needs is another war.

 12 hours ago
To Iran today is not the of 1987. Richer better armed and far more influential in large part because of the US invasion of Iraq that you so enthusiastically supported. No more US blood for oil.
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Donald Trump?  How does he go to war publicly?  He would likely lose his Libetarian support.  He would like lose a large part of his popular support.  For Bully Boy Bush -- and, let's be honest, craven Democrats in 2002 -- supporting war was an easy re-election bid.

But that's not the case for Donald Trump.  Going to war to 'defend' Saudi oil?  Does he really think the populist support he got in 2016 will stay with him?  It won't.  He talked about restoring America, he signaled that his moves would be moves to put America first -- and you really can't reconcile that with war on Iran to 'defend' Saudi oil.

There is no 'pivot' room for Donald on this issue.

He is treating this attack, claimed by the Housthis, as though it is 9/11 and, again, the American people will neither buy nor embrace that.  9/11 was not an attack on an oil field.  People died horrible painful deaths.  In the towers, some were trapped as they burned, some jumped to their death.  Those were horrible and haunting memories.  An oil field being attacked by a drone?  Not really the same thing, not at all.

William Rivers Pitt (TRUTHOUT) notes:

 “In short: it’s all super unclear,” writes Jack Crosbie for Splinter News, “but the president’s public vow to bomb whoever Saudi Arabia tells us to is not reassuring. The Saudis are perfectly capable of fighting their own battles — we’ve sold them more than enough weaponry — but Trump’s stance throughout the crisis has been that, essentially, the U.S. military stands by to defend our favorite brutal authoritarian theocracy at any cost.”
If Trump does commit the U.S. to a war in Iran on behalf of Saudi Arabia, it would unsurprisingly be one of the worst calamities of an administration made of calamities. The only surprise here is the fact that John Bolton will have to watch it all on his flat-screen at home, or from the office of his now-anti-Trump super PAC. Maybe irony has a pulse after all.

Not only would an attack on Iran over the Houthis attacking Saudi Arabia weaken Donald Trump's support in the US, it would harm him historically.  Saudi Arabia is not going to come off well in the history books.  It's an authoritarian regime.  There's no real win for Donald Trump in attacking Iran.  That, of course, doesn't mean he won't do it.

Jake Johnson (COMMON DREAMS) reports:

 With President Donald Trump firing off menacing tweets and the White House working to blame Iran—on the basis of flimsy evidence—for attacks on Saudi oil facilities over the weekend, Rep. Ilhan Omar said Monday night that Congress must act urgently to prevent Trump from launching another catastrophic military conflict in the Middle East.
"Congress has the constitutional right to declare war," the Minnesota Democrat told CNN's Erin Burnett. "The president doesn't have it. The secretary of state doesn't have it. And Saudi Arabia certainly doesn't have it."

Omar pointed to the Trump administration's decision last year to violate the Iran nuclear deal as the source of growing military tensions over the past several months, which on at least one occasion nearly resulted in a full-scale conflict.


This isn't 2002.  Meaning the American people is sick of war.  Democrats in Congress can't blindly support war thinking it will be the smart re-election strategy.  And they also can't stick their heads in the sand.  Ilhan's approach is the approach the party is going to have to take.

Failure to do so will suppress voter turnout more than anything else.  The Democrats better draw a clear line between themselves and the party in the White House if they want voters to support them at the polls in 2020.


 12 hours ago
Except for the time when Joe voted for NAFTA, PNTR with China, the Wall Street bailout, the Iraq War, bankruptcy “reform,” welfare “reform,” and cutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and veterans benefits while fighting to cut pension benefits for 1.5 million union members
Joe Biden to union members here in Philadelphia: “I have never not stepped up for you.”
20 replies487 retweets1,176 likes
 
 
Show this thread


Yes, we're gearing up for another election.  November 2020 will be here before we know it.  Nicholas Wu (USA TODAY) reports:
A new NBC/WSJ poll released Tuesday shows former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., continuing to make gains over the rest of the Democratic field. 
Biden remains the highest-polling candidate, coming in at 31%, a five-percentage-point gain from July. Warren jumped by six percentage points, from 19% to 25%. 
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., inched up from 13% to 14%, and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg remained steady at 7%. 
Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., on the other hand, fell from a high of 13% in July to 5%. 
Entrepreneur Andrew Yang moved from 2% to 4%, putting him in sixth place, behind Harris. 


The poll has a 4.4% margin of error which means Warren and Biden remain neck-and-neck in that poll.   NBC notes of their poll, "Important, however, only 9 percent of all Democratic respondents say their minds are definitely made up."  That's an important point.  But here's another: the poll is based on the media propping up Joe after the debate.  That's not reality.  And now the voices of the people -- including the voices of Latinos -- are weighing in.  Joe understands this problem.  He looked like a hero to some when he betrayed Anita Hill all those years ago.  People thought he and the others would get away wit it.  I said they wouldn't.  I said we saw what we saw and we wouldn't forget it and we would talk about it away from the media and the tide would turn.  Joe remembers that.  He was one of the people I said that too.  And the tide did turn and his treatment of Anita Hill continues to be a sore spot for his image to this day.

The media defended him.  They did so by lying.  They were bullies -- the pundits.  Americans don't like that at all.

We're going to quote Ruben Navarrette Jr. (USA TODAY) one more time:


A lot of people of color are fed up with the old school white liberalism that Biden represents. It’s not just his past opposition to forced busing in the 1970s because, as he said then, he didn’t feel “responsible for the sins” of past generations. It’s also recent gaffes. During last week's debate, Biden answered a question about atoning for slavery with a condescending stemwinder about “problems that come from home” and social workers showing parents how to parent by having “the record player on at night” so kids pick up vocabulary. 
Harris and Booker got a pass for going after Biden, yet Castro is being walloped. White pundits know better than to scold African Americans about race, but they’re not afraid of Latinos, whom they often treat like their gardeners. 

While discussing competing health care plans, the former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development mischievously poked at Biden by asking — repeatedly — whether the 76-year-old was forgetting what he said two minutes earlier.
Critics — including the news media and Biden supporters — are calling it “ageism” and a “cheap shot” by Castro. They say the 45-year-old should have shown more “respect” to his elder. 

That’s a thing in politics? Since when?

That's the opinion that's going to win out.  And we're already seeing that on campuses this week as we speak to various groups.  The media did what they always do, group-think, herd mentality and lie, especially lie.  That's going to bite them in their ass.

On the media, Cokie Roberts died . . . clutching her pearls as always.  I don't have any sympathy for her.  She was an alarmist who didn't just scream for Bill Clinton to be impeached and removed from office, she supported war and was addicted to war porn.  Her death is no great loss.  She broke no major story.  She did nothing with her life but act as a handmaiden to those who destroy.  She worked for NPR and ABC an accomplished nothing in her trade.

 17 hours ago
Let’s all remember Cokie Roberts as NPR’s champion cheerleader for the disastrous and criminal invasion of Iraq. WMD my ass.


 16 hours ago
Cokie Roberts of NPR media fame that pushed the Iraq war beyond the pale. And every other war. She is dead and will not be missed by anyone that values truth.
 
 

  1.  14 hours ago
Cokie Roberts called anti-Iraq War figurehead Cindy Sheehan an "unsophisticated woman." Guess that Sheehan wasn't a mainstay on the Beltway cocktail party circuit.
2 retweets2 likes
 
 
 19 hours ago
Cokie Roberts was a pro Iraq War voice. Years later she said leaving would be "irresponsible." She was rich & a huge apologist for war criminal GWB. In 2019 she falsely claimed Bernie & can't win - and that it'd be awful if they did. Earth is better off without her.
Cokie Roberts wanted cuts to social security & Medicare. She was for the TPP. Her brother's law firm was one of the chief lobbying groups FOR it. "Feminist" Cokie publicly called a nun (raped & tortured by Guatemala's govt) a liar while her brother was paid by said govt to do PR.
 
 

 18 hours ago
I wish it was easy to find old clips of Cokie Roberts being a right wing reactionary bitch, but here's a little taste, where she complains about politicians who were "against the Iraq War from the beginning". Cokie is very bored and unimpressed
 
 

 21 Jun 2010
Ask Cokie Roberts if she regrets saying, in late '02, that pending invasion of Iraq was not opposed by "anybody that matters."
 
 



That's the real Cokie Roberts.  Shame on those who want to applaud her as a 'first' and pretend she accomplished something.  She was a daughter of power who never challenged power.  She, her mother and her brother all struggled with ethics.  She was a War Hawk and people are dead because of her.  I'm appalled by those rushing to prop up her memory.


An old whore had a long career of peddling her tired wares in the service of empire.  Nina Totenberg thinks it's time to now mourn -- well, Nina would think that, wouldn't she?

Iraq remains a failed state, many children there suffer birth defects, over a million Iraqis are dead, many more displaced.  Sorry, Nina Totenberg, but Cokie Roberts doesn't get a pass.

AFP reports:

  It has been a shaky 11 months for Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi’s government since it was painstakingly stitched together in the prolonged wake of May 2018 elections.
The administration’s power rests on the curious coupling of firebrand cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr with Fatah, the political arm of the Hashd Al-Shaabi armed network.
But a cocktail of new pressure points — from Sadr’s frustration with the Hashd to purported Israeli strikes targeting the force — are fraying this tenuous deal, said Ihsan Al-Shammari, head of the Iraqi Center for Political Thought.
“The situation is messy. The political parties are repositioning themselves and the major alliances have broken apart,” Shammari told AFP.

He predicted the “tactical partnership” between Sadr and Fatah will collapse amid the cleric’s escalating criticism of the Hashd’s possession of arms and moves to create its own air force.



The following sites updated:




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Tuesday, September 17, 2019

Time to court-martial Tulsi

This BREITBART article made a chain through my friend Tony's work and he sent it on to me.  Tony wrote, "Remember when C.I. warned that Tulis was in the National Guard and so she had to watch the way she talked about Donald Trump?  She didn't watch it."  No, she did not.

She's gone on to call Trump "Saudi Arabia's bitch" and now, as the article explains, she's posted this nasty little message to Trump saying he's not her pimp and the military is not his whore.  As the BREITBART article notes at the end:

 Finally, as Gabbard enjoys pointing out, she is an officer in the U.S. Army National Guard. Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) prohibits commissioned officers from using “contemptuous words” about the president — whether in uniform or out of uniform. Gabbard might enjoy some leeway from a military court due to the political nature of her job, but to say Trump has betrayed the military, and to call him a “pimp” and a “bitch,” is likely a violation of the UCMJ.
Gabbard may earn herself some attention, but she could also earn a court-martial.

That's what needs to happen.  She needs to be court-martialed. 

She can't be in the reserves and making these public statements.

Donald Trump?

He's not my commander in chief.  I'm not in the military.  She is.  She's in the reserves.  He is her commander in chief and she's supposed to show respect to the office.

She needs to be court-martialed. 

Her conduct is unbecoming. 

As a member of Congress?  Not a thing wrong with it.  As an active member of the reserves?  She needs to be court-martialed.

Tulsi's become a loser.  Joe Biden, her buddy, is a loser as well.  David Stein (THE INTERCEPT) reports:

 On Thursday night, he drew criticism when he was asked what Americans can do about the legacy of slavery, and answered by suggesting parents put on a record player for kids, and that social workers should visit parents’ homes to teach them how to care for their children. He followed that by recounting on Sunday his run-in in the 1960s with a young gang leader named “Corn Pop,” a story that involved “the only white guy” at a city pool cutting him a 6-foot piece of chain to defend himself against the razor-wielding teen and his friends.
The politics of race relations have been a central part of Biden’s career, from his high-profile opposition to busing to his authoring of the 1994 Biden Crime Bill. When he talks about his criminal justice record on the campaign trail, he argues today that the focus on the ’94 bill is unfair, because the real rise in mass incarceration happened at the state level and was long underway by then.
Biden is correct that the surge began in the 1970s and accelerated in the 1980s, but a closer look at his role reveals that it was Biden who was among the principal and earliest movers of the policy agenda that would become the war on drugs and mass incarceration, and he did so in the face of initial reluctance from none other than President Ronald Reagan. Indeed, Reagan even vetoed a signature piece of Biden legislation, which he drafted with arch segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, to create a federal “drug czar.”
At the time, many Republicans were hesitant about increasing federal spending, and in fact looking for ways to slash the budget. Domestically, Reagan wanted to focus on cutting taxes and reducing social welfare spending, and had little interest in an expansive federal spending program geared toward building new prisons and hiring new police. Biden, on the other hand, was a key policy leader among both parties on the issue of expanding funding to states and municipalities for policing and prisons.
As governor of California, Reagan had been an infamous proponent for law-and-order politics, but when he ran for president in 1980 against incumbent Jimmy Carter, crime was not a significant issue in the race. Rather, the 1980 election focused largely on the economy, inflation, and unemployment.
Biden, meanwhile, was criticizing Carter for not fighting the war on drugs forcefully enough. “I’m trying to alarm the policymakers,” he told the Washington Post months before the 1980 election. “I’m saying that business as usual won’t work.”
Although mass imprisonment is and was primarily driven by states, at the federal level Biden shaped the punitive political culture of the 1980s and 1990s by reviving a policy agenda that was briefly in decline at the end of the 1970s. In three years under Carter, the federal prison population fell by a quarter, even as it was rising at the state level. By the final days of the Carter administration, the federal program that provided resources to states for policing and imprisonment, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, or LEAA, was being dismantled.
In the weeks after the election, Biden argued that the problem with LEAA was inadequate coordination and poor management, and that the federal government should take a more assertive stance in this area while continuing to provide funds to states to expand their police and prison systems. “The American people believe we have waged war on crime and failed,” Biden, who was the U.S. senator for Delaware at the time, said. “Therefore, they concluded that nothing can be done about it.” In his view, though, federal funding was an essential piece of the drug war. He saw the need for a program like LEAA, but it needed a stronger manager in charge: a drug czar.


That's the reality about Joe.  He's a liar.  He's done so much damage and he just lies and lies and lies some more.

And there was Tulsi, back in July, lying for him and defending him.  Walk away, Tulsi, we're done.

Here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"

 
Tuesday, September 17, 2019.


War?  The US government can't get enough of it these days.  You might argue they are addicted to it which is why no war appears to end anymore.  In the thirst for more killing, the US government is currently angling for war with Iran.  Bill Van Auken (WSWS) observes:

Casting itself once again as the world’s judge, jury and executioner, US imperialism is recklessly hurtling toward yet another war in the Middle East, with catastrophic implications. This time, Washington has seized upon Saturday’s attacks on Saudi installations as its pretext for war against Iran.
The reaction of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to these attacks, which have cut the kingdom’s oil production by almost half and slashed global daily output by 6 percent, was as noteworthy for its haste as for its peculiar wording.

“Iran has now launched an unprecedented attack on the world’s energy supply,” Pompeo tweeted late Saturday, adding, “There is no evidence the attacks came from Yemen.”
The indictment of Iran for attacks that set off a series of fires which devastated two oil facilities in eastern Saudi Arabia came without a shred of supporting evidence, outside of the bald assertion that there was “no evidence” that they were launched from Yemen.
Yemen had to be discounted, according to the secretary of state’s predatory logic, because the Houthi rebels, who control most of the country, had claimed responsibility for the attacks and had a clear motive—given the kingdom’s near-genocidal war against Yemen’s civilian population—for carrying them out. The US mass media has by and large echoed Pompeo’s allegations as absolute truth. On Monday night, television news broadcasts quoted unnamed intelligence sources, citing unspecified evidence, claiming Iranian responsibility for the attacks. No doubt this “evidence” will prove just as compelling as that of the Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnam and “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq. These same media outlets have made virtually no mention of Saudi crimes in Yemen.


Our wonderful corporate media wouldn't do that, would they?  They wouldn't again be infested with anonymice.   Surely, they've learned their lessons, right?  Wrong.

 47 minutes ago
New: US and Saudi Arabia believe “very high probability” this weekend’s attack on Saudi oil facilities were low altitude cruise missiles -- assisted by drones -- launched from an Iranian base near the border with Iraq - reporting
29 replies48 retweets49 likes
 
 


Nic Robertson is not reporting, Jim, he's echoing.  As are you.  For all your pious posturing and pretense, Jim, you will always be nothing more than a hack.  Don't think anyone's going to remember you when Donald Trump leaves the Oval Office.  Only the most deranged cheer you on now.

The government can't sell war without their hate merchants in the media, never forget that.  Never forget that the entire media landscaped lied the country into war with Iraq but only Judith Miller was held accountable.  Those who lied were not punished, they did not lose jobs.  In fact, THE ATLANTIC, MOTHER JONES and many others went out of their way to hire the liars.

The wars never end.  Which is how the Pentagon's DIVIDS notes Sgt Maynor Reyes is back in Iraq, 15 years after he first left.  He's now stationed at the "Erbil Air Base in northern Iraq in support of the Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve."  Kyle Rempfer (ARMY TIMES) reports, "Fort Bragg’s XVIII Airborne Corps handed off the reigns of the counter-Islamic State mission to III Armored Corps out of Fort Hood at a ceremony in Baghdad, Iraq, on Saturday."

When does the US hand off that mission to Iraq and bring all the US troops home?

It's a real shame that, after all these years, that question still can't be asked by our 'brave' press in a White House or State Dept press briefing.  Let alone in a 60 MINUTES interview with a sitting president.

President?  In the United States, the race for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination continues.  War Hawk Joe Biden desperately wants that nomination.  Norman Solomon (COMMON DREAMS) notes:

 Joe Biden’s recent efforts to deny his record of support for invading Iraq are marvels of evasion, with falsehoods that have been refuted by one well-documented appraisal after another after another. This month, Biden claimed that his vote for war on the Senate floor was somehow not a vote for war. Ironically, while he was spinning anew to deny the undeniable, theaters nationwide began screening a movie that exposes the deceptive approach to the Iraq war that Biden exemplifies.
Historically factual, “Official Secrets” is concerned with truth—and the human consequences of evading or telling it. Katharine Gun, portrayed by actress Keira Knightley, was a worker at the British intelligence agency GCHQ. Risking years in prison, she did everything she could to prevent the Iraq war, and took responsibility for doing so.
Biden did everything he could to enable the Iraq war, and—still—takes no responsibility for doing so.
More than 16 years ago, Biden and Gun were at cross purposes as the Iraq invasion neared. Subterfuge vs. candor. Misinformation vs. information. War vs. peace. Today, their public voices contrast just as sharply.
Gun recalls that both President George W. Bush and especially British Prime Minister Tony Blair were “desperate to get U.N. cover” for the impending invasion of Iraq in early 2003. On the last day of January of that year, Gun saw a memo from the U.S. National Security Agency that showed the two governments were working together to wiretap and otherwise surveil diplomats from countries on the U.N. Security Council—for purposes such as blackmail—to win a vote to authorize an invasion.
Gun became a whistleblower by providing the memo to the Observer newspaper in London. As she said in a recent interview with Salon, “My intention was to prevent the war. . . . I felt there was this information that was absolutely crucial, it had the potential to derail the rush to war, and I felt people had the right to know.”

Biden—who played a pivotal role in the rush to war as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—proceeded as though people had no right to know. He excluded critical voices and key information from the committee’s high-profile hearings in mid-summer 2002, deceptively serving as the most important lawmaker ushering the war resolution to the Senate floor, where he voted for it in mid-October. The war began five months later. It has never ended.



And Joe Biden has never taken accountability for his actions.  Chief among them?  The decision to overturn the 2010 vote of the Iraqi people and give thug Nouri a second term.  The people spoke.  They showed up to vote despite threats, despite violence, despite roads being closed.  They showed up and they went with Iraqiya.  When Nouri lost and refused to step down -- just as US Gen Ray Odierno had predicted months before -- the US could have sided with democracy.  Instead, they created a work around, The Erbil Agreement, a legal contract that overturned the vote and gave Nouri a second term and Joe showed up in Baghdad to sell it and lecture Iraqi leaders about . . . Ireland.  No one knew what crazy Joe was saying.  No one cared.  Democracy was struck down by the US government and Joe Biden needs to be asked why.  That second term resulted in the rise of ISIS in Iraq.  Overturning an election is not a minor thing.

Albert Burneko (DEADSPIN) offers:


 Or more to the point: Do you want a president who has the full command of their cognitive faculties? One who knows what the f**k is going on during a debate, or a complex legislative effort, or a tricky foreign-policy negotiation? One who can think a coherent thing, and then express that coherent thought in a coherent fashion, without digressing into gibberish about the relative merits of the victrola and the cinematograph? Of course you do. That might even be the very most obvious and reasonable baseline elimination criteria for a president: That this person’s brain works. It’s the smallest thing for a sane voter of conscience to make an absolute requirement for the gig, particularly when there’s still a double-fistful of candidates and as many as nine—but not 10!—of them clear that bar easily.
In this context, “What I demand in a president is whoever happens to be leading in early, elderly-skewing Democratic primary polling, no matter what” is absurd. You are the will those polls are attempting to capture, you and you and you and me, and your meek, passive adoption of their results is the saddest of self-fulfilling prophecies. Up to a point it may make some sense to examine one’s own feces, but one mustn’t also devour it.
Do a majority of left-of-center Americans affirmatively want to vote for Joe Biden and what he is selling—for an out-of-touch 76-year-old centrist with a failing brain, whose public proclamations and debate answers only make sense if you rearrange their letters into generous anagrams, and whose only compelling campaign pitch so far is the cynical idea that nothing on earth can rouse one’s fellow voters to a more ambitious choice? Of course not. Nobody would call that candidate out of the ether if he did not already exist. That is not anyone’s ideal choice.
So, during the primaries at least, the job is to demand a better option. Even if you like Biden; especially if you like Biden. Demand a dynamic candidate, a nimble debater and public speaker, a compelling advocate of ambitious and unlikely and transformative ideas. See if Biden, or your favorite, can prove an ability to be that. And if that candidate can’t, f**king pick somebody else!

The press is excited this news cycle because Ken Salazar has endorsed Joe Biden and not Julian Castro.  I'm sure Julian will get over it.  Ken's last prominent endorsement was Alberto Gonzales for Attorney General.

At USA TODAY, Ruben Navarrette Jr. has an excellent column.  Here's an excerpt:


A lot of people of color are fed up with the old school white liberalism that Biden represents. It’s not just his past opposition to forced busing in the 1970s because, as he said then, he didn’t feel “responsible for the sins” of past generations. It’s also recent gaffes. During last week's debate, Biden answered a question about atoning for slavery with a condescending stemwinder about “problems that come from home” and social workers showing parents how to parent by having “the record player on at night” so kids pick up vocabulary. 
Harris and Booker got a pass for going after Biden, yet Castro is being walloped. White pundits know better than to scold African Americans about race, but they’re not afraid of Latinos, whom they often treat like their gardeners. 
While discussing competing health care plans, the former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development mischievously poked at Biden by asking — repeatedly — whether the 76-year-old was forgetting what he said two minutes earlier.
Critics — including the news media and Biden supporters — are calling it “ageism” and a “cheap shot” by Castro. They say the 45-year-old should have shown more “respect” to his elder. 
That’s a thing in politics? Since when?

 It's an important column.  Meanwhile, shouldn't this be a story the media pursues?


  1.  21 hours ago
Just a video of Joe Biden in more coherent times explaining the process of how to buy politicians like him... "If you go out and bundle $250K for me and then you call me after I’m elected ... I’m gonna say come on in."
/>
0:15
21 replies193 retweets305 likes
 
 



Joe being Joe.  And that's the problem, isn't it?

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