2016 US Presidential Election Thread IX

[Irvine511]

Originally Posted by Vlad n U 2

I can do a thinkpiece on how Trump actually equals a current or former head of state of a country at odds with the US. I hear those have been pretty popular of late.

We're not at odds with Italy.

[PhilsFan]

Originally Posted by Vlad n U 2

I feel like the content in this thread is what flutters around in the head of a writer for the fucking Daily Beast.

Did you see that Sady Doyle has moved on to writing fan fiction about Clinton?

[BigMacPhisto]

Originally Posted by Headache in a Suitcase

To claim that superdelegates rig the system against the will of the people, to claim that you're above the politics as usual of Washington... and then claim you'll fight on and try to turn the superdelegates to overrule the clear will of the people by every possible measuring stick only proves that Sanders is a hypocrite, that he's no different than anyone else, and a bit of a dick to boot.

Trying to overturn the people's decision by utilizing the superdelegates is exactly what Clinton would have done in Bernie's position. Evidence? 2008 when she continually tried arguing that she would win because of the superdelegates. If you're going to have an idiotic system, can't blame Bernie for trying.

[BigMacPhisto]

Originally Posted by deep

Always enjoy Bernie's speeches. Great delivery with real conviction. Hillary, if you look at her eyes you can tell she does not even believe the crap she is spewen. Totally crooked, 100 per cent.

Especially when she's giving speeches on inequality while wearing $12,495 Armani jackets.

[Headache in a Suitcase]

Originally Posted by BigMacPhisto

Trying to overturn the people's decision by utilizing the superdelegates is exactly what Clinton would have done in Bernie's position. Evidence? 2008 when she continually tried arguing that she would win because of the superdelegates. If you're going to have an idiotic system, can't blame Bernie for trying.

You can when you hold yourself up as better than the rest.

[BigMacPhisto]

Originally Posted by womanfish

I would expect that someone who claims to be a progressive would take the tiny bit of common sense and brain power it requires to see that Clinton is actually a very good choice and very close to Bernie on most issues.

And that's where you're completely wrong. Nobody, and I mean nobody, on the far left considers Clinton a progressive. Because she's not. There's a wide chasm between her and Clinton on the issues and how much power corporate influence should play a role in our politics.

[BigMacPhisto]

Originally Posted by womanfish

What healing does there need to be?? Really?
Take about 5 minutes on Twitter and Facebook and you will find virtually every comment from a Bernie supporter is about how Hillary is the anti-Christ that they wouldn't vote for if their child's life was at stake.

You think this happened on its own? No. it's been a year of Bernie grooming them into the rabid, fact-free, paranoid, near-psychotic zombie mob.

They all parrot the same script. Oligarchs, establishment, corporate shill/whore, war-monger, $hillary, everything is rigged, Corporate Media in a conspiracy against them, etc...

Again, just not true. A ton of Bernie supporters were those that wanted nothing to do with the Democratic party in general, hate corporatism, and would usually vote in the general for someone like Jill Stein, if at all.

Bernie's not the problem, it's Clinton's continual insistence on making bad decisions for decades. I'm not sure why you think anybody on the far left needs to suck it up and vote for Clinton. Socialism and Capitalism are nowhere near the same thing, my friend.

[BigMacPhisto]

Originally Posted by womanfish

My only hope is that I trust Obama is about the only person I can think of, that can sit him down and maybe talk some sense into him. But who knows at this point.

Because if anybody has been able to unify two sides over the last seven years, it's Obama.

The Democratic party hero worship in this thread is akin to the sort of enthusiasm I see from Disney fanatics.

[BigMacPhisto]

Originally Posted by Headache in a Suitcase

You can when you hold yourself up as better than the rest.

I think you earn some wiggle room when you avoid the whole Super PAC thing.

Let's be honest, Bernie was on ground that nobody before him had been on. Of course things were going to evolve and his campaign wouldn't be able to keep all of the promises of how they were going to run it. They had no idea what they were up against and how it would all play out. But he stuck true to most of what he said he would. A personal attack here or a vague mention of trying to flip superdelegates there pales in comparison to someone flipping their stances left and right to appeal to voters.

But I'm preaching to the wrong crowd here. Clinton with her $12,000 jackets is really the savior when it comes to income inequality. Let's let the same Capitalistic mess that's caused all this try and fix everything for us.

[Irvine511]

scathing, and unfortunate. it shows what many of us came to realize about Sanders over the course of the campaign as it became evident that Bernie cares most about Bernie. pettiness, personal grudges, more faith in his gut than in data. at some point, it became a cult populated by people who use words they don't understand.

here's just the beginning:

Inside the bitter last days of Bernie's revolution
For better and for worse, Sanders made all the big decisions.
By EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE and GABRIEL DEBENEDETTI

There’s no strategist pulling the strings, and no collection of burn-it-all-down aides egging him on. At the heart of the rage against Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, the campaign aides closest to him say, is Bernie Sanders.

It was the Vermont senator who personally rewrote his campaign manager’s shorter statement after the chaos at the Nevada state party convention and blamed the political establishment for inciting the violence.

He was the one who made the choice to go after Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz after his wife read him a transcript of her blasting him on television.

He chose the knife fight over calling Clinton unqualified, which aides blame for pulling the bottom out of any hopes they had of winning in New York and their last real chance of turning a losing primary run around.

And when Jimmy Kimmel’s producers asked Sanders’ campaign for a question to ask Donald Trump, Sanders himself wrote the one challenging the Republican nominee to a debate.

There are many divisions within the Sanders campaign—between the dead-enders and the work-it-out crowds, between the younger aides who think he got off message while the consultants got rich and obsessed with Beltway-style superdelegate math, and between the more experienced staffers who think the kids got way too high on their sense of the difference between a movement and an actual campaign.

But more than any of them, Sanders is himself filled with resentment, on edge, feeling like he gets no respect -- all while holding on in his head to the enticing but remote chance that Clinton may be indicted before the convention.

Campaign manager Jeff Weaver, who’s been enjoying himself in near constant TV appearances, and the candidate’s wife Jane Sanders, are fully on board. But convinced since his surprise Michigan win that he could actually win the nomination, Sanders has been on email and the phone, directing elements of the campaign right down to his city-by-city schedule in California. He wants it. He thinks it should be his.

“Bernie’s been at the helm of this campaign from the beginning,” said Weaver, “and the overall message of this campaign and the direction of the campaign and the strategy, has been driven by Bernie.”

Convinced as Sanders is that he’s realizing his lifelong dream of being the catalyst for remaking American politics—aides say he takes credit for a Harvard Kennedy School study in April showing young people getting more liberal, and he takes personal offense every time Clinton just dismisses the possibility of picking him as her running mate—his guiding principle under attack has basically boiled down to a feeling that multiple aides sum up as: “Screw me? No, screw you.”

Take the combative statement after the Nevada showdown.

“I don’t know who advised him that this was the right route to take, but we are now actively destroying what Bernie worked so hard to build over the last year just to pick up two fucking delegates in a state he lost,” rapid response director Mike Casca complained to Weaver in an internal campaign email obtained by POLITICO.

“Thank you for your views. I’ll relay them to the senator, as he is driving this train,” Weaver wrote back.

In the run-up to the California primary, the big strategic question was how much to modulate the tone of the letter to superdelegates that he's been preparing to send out Wednesday, building on the case that Sen. Jeff Merkley, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, former Sen. Paul Kirk and former Communication Workers of America president Larry Cohen have been making to fellow superdelegates over the phone for weeks about polls and other factors that would make Sanders the more competitive general election candidate.

This isn’t about what’s good for the Democratic Party in his mind, but about what he thinks is good for advancing the agenda that he’s been pushing since before he got elected mayor of Burlington.

Sanders owns nearly every major decision, right down to the bills. A conversation with former Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin about getting left in personal debt from his own 1992 presidential campaign has stayed at the top of Sanders’ mind.

He demanded that the campaign bank account never go under $10 million, even when that’s meant decisions Weaver and campaign architect Tad Devine have protested -- like making the call in the final days before Kentucky to go with digital director Kenneth Pennington’s plan to focus on data and field, instead of $300,000 to match Clinton on TV.

Sanders ultimately lost there by just 1,924 votes.

Sanders and aides laugh at the idea that he’s damaging the party and hurting Clinton. They think they don’t get enough gratitude for how much they held back, from not targeting more Democratic members of the House and Senate who opposed him to not making more of an issue out of Clinton’s email server investigation and Bill Clinton’s sex scandals, all of which they discussed as possible lines of attack in the fall. They blame Clinton going after him on gun control for goading him into letting loose on her Goldman Sachs speeches.

“If they hadn’t started at it by really going hard at him on guns, raising a series of issues against him, that really was what led to him being much, much more aggressive than he otherwise would have been,” said Devine, the consultant who helped engineer Sanders’ plans for a protest candidacy into a real campaign (and convinced him to run as a Democrat).

Since he finished approving the ads for California not long after the Kentucky strategy spat, Devine has been back home in Rhode Island, noticeably missing from cable news as a surrogate but still regularly in touch with Sanders. Devine, who’s been more anxious about what an endgame looks like, says he hasn’t heard anything from the senator that suggests he would alter his plans because of the Clinton campaign’s eagerness to have President Barack Obama endorse her and declare the primaries done.

“They would be very smart to understand that the best way to approach Bernie is not to try to push him around,” Devine said. “It’s much better if they try to cooperate with him and find common ground. They should be mindful of the fact that the people he’s brought into this process are new to it and they will be very suspicious of any effort to push him around.”

Aides say Sanders thinks that progressives who picked Clinton are cynical, power-chasing chickens — like Sen. Sherrod Brown, one of his most consistent allies in the Senate before endorsing Clinton and campaigning hard for her ahead of the Ohio primary. Sanders is so bitter about it that he’d be ready to nix Brown as an acceptable VP choice, if Clinton ever asked his advice on who’d be a good progressive champion.

Every time Sanders got into a knife fight, aides say, they ended up losing. But they could never stop Sanders when he got his back up.

Coming off walloping Clinton in the Wisconsin primary in April, the first internal numbers from campaign pollster Ben Tulchin showed Sanders within range in New York’s pivotal contest two weeks later. Though some senior aides say they realize now the dynamics of the state and the closed primary meant they never really had a shot, they also blame coverage of his New York Daily News interview and the blowup over calling Clinton “not qualified” for taking New York off the table.

Losing Pennsylvania the following week was another body blow, one of four losses in five states that night.

In the days following, before Sanders scored his win in Indiana that campaign aides feel no one acknowledged because it came the same night Trump locked up the Republican nomination, the calls started coming in from Democratic power brokers.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid’s call was part advice, part asking a favor, urging Sanders to use his now massive email list to help Democratic Senate candidates. Russ Feingold in Wisconsin was the most obvious prospect, and Reid wanted to make introductions to Iowa’s Patty Judge and North Carolina’s Deborah Ross—to help Democrats win the majority, but also to give Sanders allies in making himself the leader of the Senate progressives come next year.
Reid, according to people familiar with the conversation, ended the discussion thinking Sanders was on board. He backed Feingold. But that’s the last anyone heard.

Word got back to Reid’s team that Weaver had nixed the idea, ruling out backing anyone who hadn’t endorsed Sanders. Weaver says it’s because the Senate hopefuls had to get in line for Sanders’ support behind top backers like Gabbard and Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.)—though neither has a competitive race this year.

Sanders never followed up himself.




Read more: Inside the bitter last days of Bernie's revolution - POLITICO

[BEAL]

I think looking for a savior is going to lead towards disappointment.

Time to move on to the general election.

[BVS]

Originally Posted by BigMacPhisto

Especially when she's giving speeches on inequality while wearing $12,495 Armani jackets.

I always use meme's to inform me on the issues.

So only poor people can speak about income equality. Good to know.

[Irvine511]

Originally Posted by BigMacPhisto

And that's where you're completely wrong. Nobody, and I mean nobody, on the far left considers Clinton a progressive.

and, really, the members of "the far left" are the best judges of these sort of things.

[BVS]

Originally Posted by BigMacPhisto

The Democratic party hero worship in this thread is akin to the sort of enthusiasm I see from Disney fanatics.

Originally Posted by BigMacPhisto

But I'm preaching to the wrong crowd here. Clinton with her $12,000 jackets is really the savior when it comes to income inequality. Let's let the same Capitalistic mess that's caused all this try and fix everything for us.

You talking about hero worship and saviors is like a Trump minion accusing someone of racism.

[BEAL]

Here's what I'm hoping from with the Bernie thing this election (and to some extent, Trump).

Start with Trump. He has shown that religion doesn't really take center stage anymore. He beat guys like Cruz, who's as fucking wacko as they come on this subject, and others like Ass Juice and Rubio. So the hope is that future candidates can go more towards the middle, not pander to a dying voter base. Not saying we'll have atheists taking center stage (I wish ), but more focus on policy, and less on a constant reinforcement of belief.

With Sanders, I'm hoping that he's given a gameplan for future progressive candidates. Learn from what Bernie did, take the positives, and avoid the mistakes. Eventually get more people like a Warren. You'll see more change with building a base of like minded people, than trying to change it all by yourself (Bernie)

[deep]

The fact that Hillary is pandering to the open border crowd should be enough for any reasonable person to consider not voting for her. Any person that does not put the security of the country first is not fit to be president.

The people that are smuggled are often exploited and treated worse than slaves.

California sees surge in Chinese illegally crossing border from Mexico

The number of Chinese immigrants illegally crossing the Mexican border into California has skyrocketed in recent years, the result of a lucrative smuggling industry, mass migration from China and a diversifying pool of migrants settling in the United States.

Between October and May, the first eight months of the fiscal year, Border Patrol agents in the San Diego sector apprehended an estimated 663 Chinese nationals, compared with 48 in the entire previous fiscal year and eight in the year before that, according to data provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Before then, “we just weren’t getting [Chinese nationals],” said Wendi Lee, a spokeswoman for the Border Patrol.

Lee said criminal organizations involved in smuggling maximize their profits by transporting Chinese immigrants, often charging premiums to get them across the border.

“We’re talking anywhere from $50,000 to $70,000 per person,” Lee said. “The farther you travel ... the more arrangements these criminal organizations have to make, the more expensive it will get.”

China has become one of the world’s leading sources of immigrants, according to a February report by the Migration Policy Institute.

“High-skilled and high-value emigration from China is rising fast, while low-skilled and unskilled emigration is stagnant — a divergence that has been widening since the late 2000s. The emigration rate of China’s highly educated population is now five times as high as the country’s overall rate," the report said. "China’s wealthy elites and growing middle class are increasingly pursuing educational and work opportunities overseas for themselves and their families, facilitated by their rising incomes."

Many of the foreign students now enrolled in U.S. universities hail from China, a result of their country’s emerging economy and growing middle class.

The Chinese account for the fifth-largest population of immigrants in the U.S. illegally, according to an October report by the Migration Policy Institute. An estimated 285,000 resided in the country in 2013.

Non-Mexican immigrants apprehended by the Border Patrol generally are turned over to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Office of Enforcement and Removal Operations, which is responsible for determining whether they will be detained or released while their cases are reviewed by an immigration court, according to ICE.

“ICE makes custody determinations on a case-by-case basis, taking into account all aspects of the person’s circumstances, including whether the individual represents a threat to public safety or is a possible flight risk,” the agency said.

Some request political asylum. Others ask to return to their home countries.

Xiao Wang, a lecturer of Chinese studies at UC San Diego, said economic opportunity is a common factor in Chinese immigration. Small-business owners travel to sell products — perfumes, electronics and cosmetics — in the United States.

“It’s people who are trying to make money,” Wang said. “I think this is happening more and more."

But Muzaffar Chishti, director of the Migration Policy Institute's office at New York University's School of Law, said it’s important to understand the bigger picture.

“It’s tempting to say that this is a dramatic rise. In the scheme of things, it’s not a dramatic rise,” he said. “[China] is the world’s largest country.” In that sense, he said, the recent increase in border crossings represents "a drop in the bucket."

Some people who cross the border illegally become victims of human trafficking, Lee said.

Last month, authorities discovered 12 such immigrants in the attic of a home in San Diego’s City Heights neighborhood. They were being held without food, with very little water and with no access to a restroom, Lee said. Five of them were Chinese.

Two suspected smugglers were taken into custody, along with all of the immigrants.

tatiana.sanchez@sduniontribune.com

Sanchez writes for the San Diego-Union Tribune.

[Headache in a Suitcase]

Originally Posted by deep

The fact that Hillary is pandering to the open border crowd should be enough for any reasonable person to consider not voting for her. Any person that does not put the security of the country first is not fit to be president.

The people that are smuggled are often exploited and treated worse than slaves.

Well you sold me.

We should build a wall. A huge wall. A tremendous wall. And get the Canadians to pay for it.

Wait, what? You only want a wall where the brown people sneak in? Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

My bad.

[corianderstem]

The AP calling it early for Clinton thing ...

I can get why that was obnoxious and poor judgement. But the people saying it was the AP in collusion with Clinton?

Come on. If anything, it would have riled up the Bernie base to get out and vote, and would have caused some of her supporters to stay home. The idea that it was her idea is ridiculous.

(A general comment, I saw people blaming her on the interwebs, not necessarily here.)

[BVS]

Originally Posted by deep

The fact that Hillary is pandering to the open border crowd should be enough for any reasonable person to consider not voting for her. Any person that does not put the security of the country first is not fit to be president.

Clinton Releases Plan to Dissolve U.S. Border Within 100 Days - Breitbart

It's true, just look at her plan to dissolve the border. Breitbart's the tru sauce.

[BigMacPhisto]

Originally Posted by Irvine511

and, really, the members of "the far left" are the best judges of these sort of things.

Indeed they are. Because actual progressives believe in actual progressive politics. Clinton deciding that she's a progressive suddenly near the end of 2015 doesn't make her one. Her disappointing track record says otherwise.

Sanders may have tried to co-opt a party he never belonged to, but Clinton has tried to co-opt a part of the political sphere she has never belonged to...at least Bernie can fit in the all encompassing banner of "Democrat" under our two-party system. Clinton's attempts to be a liberal are exceedingly hollow.