I am not saying “give up”.
I am saying “recognise that electoralism is not a sufficient response to the situation”.
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Demings is a bluedog, an ex police chief, and well to the right of Klobuchar. There need to be more choices.
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Wow—I’ve been avoiding political news and hadn’t seen that. From Politico
Reade declined to comment for this story and instead texted a screenshot from a previously published article where she claimed she obtained an undergraduate degree under a special arrangement with a former chancellor of the university, Toni Murdock. CNN first reported on questions regarding Reade’s educational background.
However, university officials conferred with Murdock, an Antioch official told POLITICO, and confirmed that no special arrangement existed.
So…she’s apparently been lying about her credentials for years, including while she acted as an expert witness in court. False testimony is, as far as I know, the #2 reason for dropping a client (behind #1, not getting paid, which is probably not at issue in this case).
Huge blow to her credibility.
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Yeah. Quite a lot has been unearthed about Reade in recent days, but I think Wigdor dropping her case is pretty telling. Katha Pollitt had a piece in The Nation a few days ago which I think was reflective of some views on these BB threads:
I would vote for Joe Biden if he boiled babies and ate them. He wasn’t my candidate, but taking back the White House is that important.
But then she points out:
Fortunately, I may not have to sacrifice morality to political necessity.
and summarizes some of the reasons not to believe Reade. Along the way she directs us to Susan Faludi’s interesting argument that the evolution of “I believe her” into “believe all women” was a deliberate right-wing creation designed to attack women:
“It looks like #BelieveAllWomen, especially recently, is being used in opposition to #BelieveWomen.” Its use spikes on occasions when allegations are made against a liberal politician — often with companion hashtags decrying a double standard.
I still think some kind of official investigation needs to be done – when it is possible – but at this point anyone who refers to this Biden incident as if it should matter is either grinding their own axe or serving as a useful idiot for Trump or Putin.
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Also, it’s not even remotely what the polling is saying.
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I want to see Biden clearly and consistently above 50% - but really- it’s the swing states that matter most.
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I am not black, but your statement is 100% correct for me as well.
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I don’t share your pessimism about the vote, just the outcome. I suspect Trump loses spectacularly, then the shenanigans go up a few dozen notches. That is my biggest worry.
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This. If you’re spending all your time tearing down his opponent while doing nothing to defeat Trump - you’re working to elect Trump.
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“The blinders have been taken off,” Biden told supporters recently during a virtual fundraiser from his Delaware home, where he has been since March. “Because of this Covid crisis, I think people are realizing, ‘My Lord, look at what is possible. Look at the institutional changes we can make.’”
In recent weeks, Biden, who has climbed above Trump in national polls, has openly courted progressive leaders and ideas, adopting some of the populist rhetoric more commonly associated with his vanquished rivals, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. In turn, they have offered their full-throated endorsements, casting Biden, a pragmatic dealmaker who still believes in bipartisan comity, as the perhaps unlikely herald of a new progressive era.
“A shift of frame matters – it’s not to be underestimated,” the California congressman Ro Khanna, who was a co-chair of Sanders’ presidential campaign, said of Biden’s bold messaging. “It’s a totally different vision for what he thinks the next four years should be about.”
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I’ll believe that when he chooses a VP running mate who isn’t more to the right than most of the Republican candidates in the 1980s. (I know you agree with this statement.)
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The country is in a really dismal place politically. 40% of the population is in the tank for Trump, whose politics even in the Reagan era would have looked completely off the deep end. The Democratic Party, after its subversion by the DLC in the 1980s, is now only just getting back to its 1970s values. The former means Biden has to be close to perfect in order to capture almost all of the 60% of the electorate that is up for grabs, and the latter means that the pool of progressive VP candidates with appropriate experience is smaller than it ought to be.
Whether any of them meets cutoff of “isn’t more to the right of most of the Republican candidates in the 1980s” – well, that’s a pretty low bar: Reagan, Pat Robertson, Dan Quayle, Bob Dole, post-Reagan George Bush, Jack Kemp, Donald Rumsfeld, Alexander Haig, and some even-lesser names. If Biden can’t find someone to the left of this motley crew than we’re in serious trouble.
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Here for my regular pedantic correction: 24% of the population is in the tank for Trump. 28% voted for someone else last time around, and half sat the 2016 election out.
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And in that half: young people and minorities and the working poor. Uncle Joe isn’t offering them a lot, and as much as they might dislike Biff they’re also not going to show up to vote for a “return to [the broken] normal” that Biden is promising.
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In case anyone is still tracking.
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Don’t blame me, I voted for the other guy. (Or a couple of them, we had ranked-choice voting this year instead of our usual caucus.) FWIW, Sanders got 37% of the vote and picked up 5 of the 15 regular delegates.
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And even then a significant portion of that 24% is in the tank for themselves.
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