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The Democrat's roster for a Trump - beater in 2020


swordfish

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2 hours ago, Impartial_Observer said:

He'll be fine, he's got congressional insurance provided by the taxpayers, not the stuff us peasants have to buy. 

Why should a vegan who abhors the practice of eating meat be forced by the government to pay even a dime towards the SNAP benefits of meat eaters?

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The Economic Consequences of Sen. Sanders’ Stock Confiscation Plan: https://www.cato.org/blog/economic-consequences-sen-sanders-stock-confiscation-plan

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Bernie Sanders would confiscate 20 percent ownership stakes in 22,000 companies, distributing the stocks to workers through shared employee ownership funds. His “Corporate Accountability Plan,” announced yesterday, should lay to bed any lingering doubts that “democratic socialism” is just about social democracy, or a bigger welfare state. Rather, it amounts to a fundamental attempt to re-order the American economy through federal government edicts.

Under Sanders’ “Democratic Employee Ownership Funds,” all publicly traded companies and those with at least $100 million in annual revenue would have to contribute 20 percent of their stock to “workers” over a decade, creating an “employee-controlled fund” that distributes any dividends to employees. Unlike ordinary stocks, workers couldn’t sell or transfer the stocks in their name. Instead, the fund would be managed by elected worker representatives, with ordinary voting rights. Worker representatives would also make up at least 45 percent of boards in firms with at least $100 million in annual revenue, $100 million balance sheets, and publicly traded companies.

There are some obvious economic problems with this combined plan:

  • If we force businesses to compensate employees via collective stock donations, then employers will look to reduce remuneration costs in other ways, most likely reducing wages to offset the cost of said donations. We’d expect Bernie’s plan then to change the composition of remuneration, but not its overall level.
  • If this is correct, most ordinary risk averse employees would be worse off under this plan. They would have preferred the extra wage income for diversification purposes (i.e. the ability to invest their extra income elsewhere). Because the stock is locked in the fund, a company failure now means they lose their jobs’ wages AND the value of the stocks they notionally “own.”
  • True, some companies and employees clearly do prefer stock compensation, especially in Silicon Valley start-ups. This can make economic sense in firms with limited cash that are trying to attract talented workers in businesses with the potential to grow rapidly. It’s evidence from these types of exceptions that is usually used to “prove” that employee ownership improves incentives and business outcomes.
  • If co-operatives and mutuals really did harness dispersed information and align incentives to engender more business success across the board though, then why don’t socialists actively create such firms and outcompete ordinary stockholder businesses, rather than seeking coercive government mandates to facilitate their idea? Indeed, why don’t more businesses decide to mutualize anyway?
  • The reason, surely, is that this ownership structure would create big problems for many companies. Most obviously it would risk inefficient decision-making by worker board members and create severe difficulties in raising new capital (it’s little surprise that most advocates of this type of plan worldwide also suggest new government “investment banks.") In Yugoslavia, where such market socialism was rolled out extensively, academic research suggests the country became afflicted with the same inefficiencies, stagnation and impaired capital allocation as seen in other socialist economies.
  • This is unsurprising. Elected worker-owner representatives and board members will result in a political system in business decisions. Workers and their ownership and board representatives have their own self-interests (not least being re-elected) and interest groups would quickly form for both (e.g. worker representation for those with stronger interests in shoring up the pension plan, those workers resisting a plant closure etc.) Since workers aren’t generally tied to a business for life, short-termism might become a problem – trying to raise overall remuneration rather than longer-term investment. Or else investment might be biased towards protecting jobs even though any profits might be socially better invested elsewhere.
  • Of course, firms may seek to also avoid the measures by restructuring businesses to avoid public listing, or separate parts of the company to avoid exceeding the $100 million revenue threshold. Other board members may try to resist dividend payouts until a new president and Congress would overturn the measures too, significantly distorting business decisions.

Employee-owned businesses, mutuals, and co-ops are a perfectly normal part of the rich tapestry of a free economy. Mandating this structure and confiscating and redistributing stock to achieve it is another matter entirely.

 

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On Medicare for All, Elizabeth Warren Is Fundamentally Dishonest: https://reason.com/2019/10/16/on-medicare-for-all-elizabeth-warren-is-fundamentally-dishonest/

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Elizabeth Warren is being fundamentally dishonest about Medicare for All. Not just vague. Not just evasive. Not just dodgy. Dishonest

At last night's Democratic primary debate, Warren repeatedly refused to admit something that is obviously true: that Medicare for All, the single-payer health care plan envisioned by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) that Warren says she supports, would require higher taxes on most Americans, including the middle class. 

We know that this is true because the plan would, according to multiple independent estimates as well as Sanders himself, cost somewhere in the range of $30 or $40 trillion over a decade. (A new estimate of the type of plan that Warren and Sanders support puts the cost at just a hair over $34 trillion.) the That's $30 or $40 trillion in new government spending, on top of the federal spending that would have occurred otherwise. And as Sanders—who likes to remind people that he "wrote the damn bill"—has said on many occasions, that means higher taxes. Sanders has not proposed tax revenues that are sufficient to cover the cost of his plan. But he has, at least, been clear that higher taxes are part of the deal. 

Warren, pushed at last night's debate to acknowledge what even Sanders admits, declined. Instead, despite attacks from rival candidates Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.), and former Vice President Joe Biden, she stuck firmly to a canned talking point about "costs."

"We can pay for this," she said at one point. "I've laid out the basic principles. Costs are going to go up for the wealthy. They're going to go up for big corporations. They will not go up for middle-class families."

Warren's answer isn't just designed to avoid answering the question; it is designed to mislead. 

"We can pay for this," she says, yet the Sanders plan, as written, does not raise sufficient tax revenue to cover the massive new federal spending it would require. "I've laid out the basic principles," she says, yet aside from a broad statement that costs will go up for corporations and the wealthy, but not the middle class, she has proposed nothing that would provide even the most general sense of how she would finance a single-payer system. The "basic principles" she has laid out are vague to the point of total uselessness. 

Warren's defenders, and supporters of Medicare for All, have insisted that the awkwardness of her answer is merited by the disingenuousness of the underlying question. What most people care about, this argument goes, is total costs, not taxes. That's why Warren avoids directly answering the question: What matters, in this view, is that under Medicare for All, total health care costs for the nation and for most families would go down. That's what Bernie Sanders says, in his own way, and that's what Warren is attempting to get across. 

This is a fair defense of Warren in the sense that it accurately captures the heart of Warren's talking point. The problem is that there is good reason to believe that her talking point is wrong, or at the very least debatable. 

Instead of lowering total national health care spending, one estimate found that the Sanders plan—the plan that Warren supports—would increase total health care spending by more than $6 trillion. That figure comes from a 2016 analysis of the plan by the Urban Institute, a reputable liberal think tank. Warren can't simply dismiss this as a right-wing talking point. 

The same goes for another analysis of Medicare for All, by Emory University health policy scholar Kenneth Thorpe. 

Thorpe's estimates of an earlier iteration of the Sanders plan found that more than 70 percent of people who now have private insurance—the majority of Americans with health coverage—would pay more in taxes than they would save. Thorpe also found that the Sanders plan had estimated more annual savings on prescription drugs than the U.S. spends in a year, meaning that prescription drug spending would literally have to be negative.

The Sanders camp revised that figure in response, but the essential features of the plan have stayed largely the same. And Thorpe remains skeptical of the way proponents of Medicare for All have described the plan: "Obviously, all of the 180 million people who have private insurance are not going to pay less. It's impossible to have an 'everybody wins' scenario here," he recently told The Washington Post, later adding: "There's no question it hits the middle class,"

Thorpe isn't some predictable conservative critic. He's not even a longtime liberal skeptic of single-payer: In 2006, he laid out a proposal for a single-payer plan for Bernie Sanders' home state of Vermont. Yet his estimates indicate that, contrary to Elizabeth Warren's promises, health care costs for the middle class would go up. 

Yes, other estimates have found that total spending might go down. But at minimum, it's far from clear what would happen, especially since Warren has provided so few details about what she wants to do. And the idea that taxes would go up by quite a lot is far from a fringe position. As University of Chicago economist Katherine Baicker recently told The Washington Post, "Most of the proposals to move to Medicare-for-all would involve substantial tax increases that would affect most people."

This is what Warren won't say. Instead, she is leaning on a dubious talking point designed to avoid the plain truth that taxes will go up under the plan she supports. She isn't trying to inform the public about the nuances of an academic debate. She isn't being straightforward. She has settled on a response that has been calculated to mislead for political gain. 

Pete keep up the health care attacks on Warren this morning.
"I have a lot of respect for Senator Warren but last night she was more specific about the number of selfies she's taken than about how this plan is going to be funded."
pic.twitter.com/asOJwZzHw1

— Alex Thompson (@AlxThomp) October 16, 2019

 

In doing so, she has opened herself up to substantive attacks from her rivals, and undermined the core argument of her presidential campaign. Warren has presented herself as a kind of wonk populist whose mastery of policy detail and ability to communicate complex ideas are among her key strengths. Her campaign is structured around the idea that she knows exactly what she's doing—and that, as a result, you can trust her. What Warren made clear at last night's debate, and what she has proven over and over again on the campaign trail, is that only the first part is true. 

 

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https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/pete-buttigieg-focus-group-finds-his-sexuality-problematic-among-black-voters-in-south-carolina

Pete Buttigieg’s sexuality could prevent him from earning support among black Americans in South Carolina.

According to a report from a focus group conducted by the mayor’s campaign, black voters found his sexuality to be “a barrier” stopping them from supporting Buttigieg as their candidate of choice.

Buttigieg, 37, married his husband, Chasten Buttigieg, in 2018.

Benenson Strategy Group, who provided Buttigieg’s campaign with a 21-page report and summary from the focus group, revealed that “being gay was a barrier” for many of the individuals who participated in the group, especially the male participants “who seemed deeply uncomfortable even discussing it.”

The summary stated that most participants would still vote for Buttigieg if he earns the nomination, but would prefer that his sexuality “not be front and center.”

A male participant said, “I don’t like the fact that he threw out there that he lives with his husband.” Another participant, a woman under the age of 40, claimed details of Buttigieg’s relationship was “too much information.”

So in a "all-inclusive world without groups" who is in the wrong here?  Mayor Pete for assembling a racial focus group to be able to adjust his message so he can become more marketable to that group......or the racial group for being homophobic?  Or me for pointing it out?

 

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Elizabeth Warren Wants to Raise Taxes by $26 Trillion: https://reason.com/2019/11/07/elizabeth-warren-wants-to-raise-taxes-by-26-trillion/

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One of the challenges presented by the leftward turn in the Democratic presidential primary race is effectively capturing the scale of the tax and spending proposals the leading candidates have put forth. The numbers regularly stretch into the trillions, or even multiple tens of trillions. To put that in contrast, a decade ago, early drafts of the health law that became Obamacare were viewed as pushing the boundaries of political acceptability because they ran just over $1 trillion over a decade. A trillion dollars! Even for Washington, that was a lot of money, an expansion of the size of government large enough to give some Democrats pause. 

Today, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) says his Medicare for All plan would cost $30 or $40 trillion over 10 years. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) has proposed $2.75 trillion worth of education policy reforms, and her notion that she could implement a single-payer health care system with just—"just"—$20 trillion in new federal spending is viewed by many as unrealistically low. 

There is an element of unreality to these ideas, a sense in which they are meant as symbols and signifiers rather than practical, concrete agenda items. As Kate McKinnon's parody version of Elizabeth Warren said on Saturday Night Live this weekend, responding to a question about Medicare for All's enormous price tag, "When the numbers are this big, they're just pretend." 

And yet—these are, in fact, real and nominally serious proposals from actual candidates who are actually running for president. So it is worth putting them in perspective, not only on their own, but in context with each other. 

Sanders has proposed a whopping $97.5 trillion worth of new government spending over the next decade, according to an estimate by the Manhattan Institute's Brian Riedl. To pay for all that spending, Sanders would presumably give speeches about how we don't need to pay for all that spending. But he would also raise taxes by about $23 trillion over the same time frame. The federal government expects to raise roughly $3.6 trillion in tax revenue this year, and spend about $1 trillion more than that (hence our trillion-dollar budget deficit). The Sanders agenda, if enacted in full, would dramatically increase the tax burden Americans are expected to shoulder, and, at the same time, add about $90 trillion to federal deficits. The Sanders agenda manages to simultaneously be absurdly, almost comically unrealistic and economically catastrophic. 

And then there is Warren and her plans, many of which involve raising taxes. Warren has not proposed quite as much new spending as Sanders, but she has proposed even more in the way of new taxation. All together, Warren would raise taxes by $26.3 trillion, according to a new report by Nicole Kaeding of the National Taxpayers Union Foundation. Warren would supplement that by freeing up some currently untaxed dollars for taxation and increasing tax enforcement, which she claims would raise another $2.3 trillion. If Warren somehow managed to pass her entire wish list, the result would be a 63 percent increase in expected federal revenues over the next 10 years, according to Kaeding. 

Over that same time, total individual and corporate income tax revenues are projected to be about $26.8 trillion. "In other words," Kaeding writes, "the total revenue effects of Warren's proposals would be similar to a plan in which every individual and corporate tax bill was doubled outright." Warren's plans would amount to a historically unprecedented increase in the size and scale of government. 

Naturally, there are various technical problems with Warren's plans that the headline numbers don't fully capture. Her wealth tax almost certainly wouldn't raise as much money as she hopes. The grab bag of taxes she has proposed were not designed to function in tandem, and the complex interactions between them would probably lower total revenue, which would lead to larger deficits without offsetting spending cuts. Warren has plans for all sorts of new taxes, but not for how to make them all work together. 

Wonky quibbles aside, however, it is valuable to simply consider the bigger picture. The foundation of Warren's candidacy is her vast policy agenda—her plans for everything. But enacting each and every one of her plans would result, at minimum, in a profound transformation of the American economy, pulling tens of trillions of dollars out of the private sector and putting that money under the control of the federal government. The full Warren agenda would empower bureaucrats and politicians, and it would almost certainly drag down the nation's economy, affecting jobs and livelihoods for millions of Americans, many of whom would not be billionaires or even millionaires. And while Warren claims not to tax the middle class directly, she only avoids doing so through tortured workarounds that would inevitably hit middle-class paychecks. 

One might argue, somewhat reasonably, that Warren's agenda is more aspirational than practical, that it's a sellable political vision, not legislative text, and that even if Democrats somehow sweep Congress and the White House next year, it's unlikely to pass in full, or even in large part. 

Looked at this way, the Warren agenda (and in a different way, the Sanders agenda) is a kind of joke, a pin-up board of preposterously big-ticket proposals that rely on made-up numbers to pay for made-up programs that, like most games of make-believe, haven't been precision engineered to function in reality, because they aren't really expected to ever become law. There is a sense in which Warren, like her SNL counterpart, isn't sweating the size of the numbers involved because, well, it's all pretend. 

Yet there is another sense in which the fanciful ambitions of Warren's agenda aren't funny at all, but something rather more terrifying. Because even if they do not represent a politically likely outcome, they do represent a very real worldview, a belief that the government both can and should be operating at a size and scale far beyond any precedent in the nation's history. The best way to understand Warren's tax agenda, then, may not be as a series of large numbers, but as a wholesale transformation of American life. 

Scary stuff.

 

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Democrats Are Conjuring Up New 'Rights': https://reason.com/2019/11/17/democrats-are-conjuring-up-new-rights/

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"Living close to work shouldn't be a luxury for the rich," Democratic presidential candidate and former congressman Beto O'Rourke tweeted in September. "It's a right for everyone."

In a video of a campaign stop embedded in the tweet, the perpetually earnest Texan elaborated on this new right.

"Here's a tough thing to talk about, though we must," O'Rourke said. "Rich people are going to have to allow, or be forced to allow, lower-income people to live near them….We force lower-income, working Americans to drive one, two, three hours in either direction to get to their jobs, very often minimum wage jobs."

There are a half-dozen fuzzy-to-erroneous ideas baked into that language—"we" don't "force" just about anyone to drive two-plus hours a day to and from work, for starters. But the underlying principle is worth pondering, particularly since you see it all over the left side of the political spectrum these days. O'Rourke is urgently demanding a federal role in life choices that are shaped by policies at the state and local level.

The Bill of Rights, famously, focuses on "negative" rights—the stuff that government is prohibited from doing to you. ("Congress shall make no law," etc.) In 1944, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt suggested a "second Bill of Rights" that would put the federal government in the position of affirmatively guaranteeing "positive" outcomes—"the right of every family to a decent home," freedom from "unfair competition and domination by monopolies," and so on.

The idea went nowhere constitutionally, but the principles behind it survived beyond FDR, notably through President Harry Truman's 1949 Fair Deal, which called for such positive goods as universal health care, and which served as a precursor to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs of the mid-1960s.

Ambitious, managerial progressivism crashed and burned with the quadruple disappointments of Vietnam, inflation, rising crime, and the longstanding surveillance abuses uncovered in the Watergate scandal. The next two Democratic presidents were both defined by what former California Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown once called the "era of limits." Even President Barack Obama initially coupled his signature domestic expansion of government, the Affordable Care Act, with talk of tackling long-term entitlement reform and enacting a "net spending cut."

That era is no more. Even in the face of renewed trillion-dollar budget deficits and a sitting president who cheerfully abuses power, Democrats are all in on expanding federal and executive authority, locating positive rights under every rock.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) in September called for national rent control, plus $2.5 trillion in new federal housing-construction money, paid for by a wealth tax on the top 0.1 percent. Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) is proposing $2 trillion of new spending for historically black colleges and universities alone. That's not enough for former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, who wants that whole smorgasbord plus slavery reparations, as spelled out at the third Democratic presidential primary debate: "We have to connect the dots," he said, "to uplift the quality of life, to invest in housing opportunity, to invest in job opportunity, to invest in community schools that offer resources like parents able to go back and get their GED, and health care opportunities, and those things that truly ensure that the entire family can prosper." Is that all?

On the narrower issue of housing, Democratic presidential candidates are proposing the same types of policies—rent control, subsidies, tax hikes, limitations of property rights—that are already on the books in places where housing is expensive and commutes are long, such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. Unlike the Sunbelt metro areas where housing is cheap, these places also happen to be run by Democrats.

On the broader issue of philosophical rights, there is genuine cause for despair. A previous generation's myriad governing failures and roster of political creeps led to a productive period of skepticism about what the federal government should try to do. But faced with a president they find repulsive to the core and with unfunded future payment obligations in the many trillions, Democrats think now is the time to really unleash Washington. You have the right to remain pessimistic.

 

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Nancy Pelosi Is Already Attacking the Legitimacy of the 2020 Election: https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/2020-election-nancy-pelosi-already-attacking-legitimacy/

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Nancy Pelosi just stated that ‘it is dangerous to let the voters decide Trump’s fate.’ @FoxNews In other words, she thinks I’m going to win and doesn’t want to take a chance on letting the voters decide. Like Al Green, she wants to change our voting system. Wow, she’s CRAZY!” tweeted Donald Trump Tuesday.

Well, not exactly. Trump’s tweet quotes a Fox News reporter summarizing Pelosi’s position, not the speaker’s statement verbatim. Left-wing Twitterverse, of course, was immediately able to jump all over the president’s clumsy wording and act as if the substance of his contention was wholly untrue. It wasn’t.

In her Dear Colleague letter pushing back against Republican anti-impeachment talking points, Nancy Pelosi wrote this: “The weak response to these hearings has been, ‘Let the election decide.’ That dangerous position only adds to the urgency of our action, because the President is jeopardizing the integrity of the 2020 elections.” Is he?

If a Republican had suggested that a presidential election was a “dangerous” notion, he would have triggered around-the-clock panic-stricken coverage on CNN and a series of deep dives in The Atlantic lamenting the conservative turn against our sacred democratic ideals.

What Pelosi has done is even more cynical. She’s arguing that if Democrats fail in their efforts to impeach Trump — and, I assume, remove him from office — then the very legitimacy of the 2020 election will be in question before any votes are cast.

Though most liberals have long declared the 2016 contest contaminated, as far as we know, absolutely nothing — not even the most successful foreign efforts in “interference” or “meddling” — damaged the integrity of the election results. Notwithstanding the belief of over 60 percent of Democrats, precipitated by breathless and often misleading media coverage, not one vote was altered by Putin, nor was a single person’s free will purloined by a Russian Twitter bot or Facebook ad.

And, contra Pelosi’s implication, whatever you make of Trump’s request from Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden’s shady son, not one voter will be restricted from casting a ballot for whomever they please in 2020. In truth, voters will know more about the inner workings of Trump’s presidency than they have about any other administration in memory. Maybe they care, maybe they don’t, but that’s not up to Pelosi.

Rather than safeguarding the integrity of our elections, Democrats have corroded trust in them. Post-2016 calls for increased control over speech on the Internet, for instance, pose a far greater danger to American freedoms than anything our enemies at the Kremlin could cook up. And if the contention is that the only truly legitimate election is one that is free of any attempts to mislead voters, as seems to be the case, then we might as well close up shop. Because the presence of unregulated political rhetoric is a feature of a free and open society. We will never be able to, nor should we aspire to, limit discourse.

It shouldn’t be forgotten, either, that this habit of injecting doubt into the electoral process is nothing new. For the past 20 years (at least), Democrats have shown a destructive inability to accept the fact that a bunch of voters simply disagree with them. If it’s not “dark money” boring into their souls, it’s gerrymandering, special interests, confusing ballots, voter suppression, crafty Ruskies or the Electoral College. Democrats can’t lose on the merits. Someone, somewhere, has fooled the Proles into making bad decisions.

All that said, it is Pelosi’s constitutional prerogative to try to impeach Trump for any reasons she sees fit, even if her goal is only to weaken the political prospects of her opponent. No, it isn’t a “coup,” but it’s certainly not a constitutional imperative, either. It’s a political choice.

In the end, the presidency happens to be one of the things we do decide via elections. That will almost surely be the case when it comes Trump, and Pelosi knows it. And when Trump isn’t removed by the Senate, and if the results don’t go the way Pelosi hopes, she’s preemptively given Democrats a reason to question the legitimacy of yet another election.

 

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Kamala Harris ends Democratic presidential campaign: https://apnews.com/9f15f9bae46c54de8d88ad3e8388e4be

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Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris told supporters on Tuesday that she was ending her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.

“I’ve taken stock and looked at this from every angle, and over the last few days have come to one of the hardest decisions of my life,” she wrote in a note to supporters. “My campaign for president simply doesn’t have the financial resources we need to continue.”

Harris launched her campaign in front of 20,000 people at a chilly, outdoor campaign launch in January. The first woman and first black attorney general and U.S. senator in California’s history, she was widely viewed as a candidate poised to excite the same segment of voters that sent Barack Obama to the White House.

She raised an impressive $12 million in the first three months of her campaign and quickly locked down major endorsements meant to show her dominance in her home state, which offers the biggest delegate haul in the Democratic primary contest.

But as the field grew, Harris’s fundraising remained flat; she was unable to attract the type of attention being showered on Pete Buttigieg by traditional donors or the grassroots firepower that drove tens of millions of dollars to Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

Harris suffered from what allies and critics viewed as an inconsistent message. Her slogan “for the people,” referenced her career as a prosecutor, a record the campaign struggled to pitch to the party’s most progressive voters.

Through the summer, she focused on pocketbook issues and her “3 a.m. agenda,” a message that never seemed to resonate with voters. By the fall, she had returned to her courtroom roots with the refrain that “justice is on the ballot,” both a cry for economic and social justice as well as her call that she could “prosecute the case” against a “criminal” president.

Who is the next to thrown in the towel?  Cory Booker?  Mayor Pete?

 

Edited by Muda69
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Just now, TrojanDad said:

eliminating each other and at end, here comes Hillary.......strategery.......

I will not be surprised if Ms. Clinton swoops in around the time of the Democratic convention, what with Mr. Bloomberg now entering the race with supposedly a plan to force a brokered convention: https://newrepublic.com/article/155789/theres-one-way-patrick-bloomberg-campaigns-make-sense

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I just listened to Joe Rogan's podcast with Tulsi Gabbard. I came away being even more impressed with her than ever. She makes an incredible amount of sense on foreign policy and even some domestic policy. She got a free pass on most of the divisive domestic stuff, I was a little disappointed with Joe Rogan as it wasn't discussed. Which is odd given Rogan's marathon podcasts. After checking out her website and based on what little I've seen on the debates, I don't think I could vote for her, but she seems one of the least bat shit crazies on the stage. She is not currently qualified for the December debate, which is a shame, hopefully she makes the show. 

The more I see of Mayor Pete, the less I think. He's a spineless pandering politician who's life is dictated by polls. I never thought I would see this come to fruition:

s-l640.jpg

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https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-blames-staff-says-nobody-warned-him-sons-ukraine-job-could-raise-conflict

Former Vice President Joe Biden claimed in a new interview that when his son Hunter was a board member of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings while he was in office, no one informed him that it could pose a problem.

Biden insisted again that Hunter did nothing wrong, but this time appeared to fault his staff for not cluing him in that there could be concerns about his son's involvement with the foreign company that had been under investigation while Biden was in office and dealing with Ukraine policy.

"Nobody warned me about a potential conflict of interest. Nobody warned me about that," Biden told NPR in a story posted Monday.

State Department official George Kent addressed this during his testimony as part of the impeachment inquiry of President Trump, acknowledging that he told staff members there was concern over the appearance of a conflict of interest, but that no one told the vice president because his older son Beau was suffering from what was ultimately a fatal battle with brain cancer.

"They should have told me," Biden says now. Hunter's dealings and the elder Biden's role ousting a prosecutor looking into Burisma are being used by Trump and his supporters against the now-2020 presidential candidate, even as Trump's effort to press for an investigation into that conduct has spurred the impeachment inquiry.

"The appearance looked bad and it gave folks like Rudy Giuliani an excuse to come up with a Trumpian kind of defense, while they were violating the Constitution," Biden said.

"Nobody warned me about it"......Was he really that stupid?   Or does he just think we are.......

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Image result for biden facepalm

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Bernie Sanders Wants to Kill Pro Baseball: https://mises.org/wire/bernie-sanders-wants-kill-pro-baseball

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Bernie Sanders loves baseball. He loves it so much, that when he learned of Major League Baseball’s decision to phase out 42 of their 160 minor league teams, he called for the government to pressure the MLB to keep the teams, protecting the jobs of minor league players while raising their annual salaries. He has suggested using the government subsidies to professional sports stadiums to compel the League to submit to his demands. But his goal is not to reduce corporate welfare (is it ever?) — he merely wants a business to maintain its unprofitable branches.

It should be absurd enough — even to people who subscribe to Sanders’s socialist ideas — to say that the government needs to protect the jobs of people who play games for a living. Sports entertainment is certainly a valid economic good, but the most faithful apostles of state omnipotence should be able to recognize that salaried professionals for games is a remarkable luxury that few people can realistically expect to enjoy in any economy. Sanders also cites the community value of minor league baseball teams — romantically referencing his own personal memories — failing to realize that profits from attendance are the signal of how much a community values the franchise. It is as if Sanders is a better judge of what communities value than the citizens themselves.

These obvious objections aside, Sanders thinks he is working to save baseball, but if he gets his way, his plan is actually likely to accelerate baseball’s decline (unless the government beefs up its subsidies for professional sports, which Sanders would undoubtedly support). The reality is that the minor league system is a relic of a society that consumed sports very differently from the way modern spectators do, and the decision to phase out minor league teams reflects these changes.

....

By the 1980s, when college baseball started to enjoy its own rapid rise in popularity — even earning modest television coverage — minor league baseball began to look increasingly unnecessary. In fact, as Sanders himself inadvertently hints, government subsidies (including, significantly, support from municipal governments) have helped prop up both major and minor league franchises. Sanders fails to recognize that the necessity of these subsidies undermines his claim about the community value of the sports teams — if communities value them, they’ll buy tickets to the games.

Apparently, what people really value is the ability to watch the greatest athletes from the comfort of their homes for free instead of paying to watch second-tier athletes live. The MLB is merely responding to customer demand by phasing out minor league franchises, and if Bernie gets his way — short of doling out more government largesse to franchise owners — his plan will not save baseball; it will help kill it.

More big government, more taxpayers funds wasted, that is the "solution" to everything the Mr. Sanders and all other liberals view as a problem.  

 

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Castro drops out of 2020 U.S. presidential race: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-castro/castro-drops-out-of-2020-u-s-presidential-race-idUSKBN1Z10ZE

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Julian Castro, the grandson of a Mexican immigrant who became San Antonio mayor and a U.S. housing secretary, suspended his 2020 Democratic presidential run on Thursday after a candidacy overshadowed by more famous liberals.

The departure of the only Latino from the campaign, a month or so ahead of early nominating contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, leaves 14 Democratic candidates tmsnrt.rs/2Ff62ZC in a still crowded field seeking the party's nomination to take on Republican President Donald Trump in November.

The charisma and assertiveness that helped make Castro, 45, a rising star in the Democratic Party did not translate into enough support to compete against better-known candidates, including progressive U.S. Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

....

And another one bites the dust.   

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Marianne Williamson Withdraws from the Presidential Race: https://reason.com/2020/01/12/marianne-williamson-withdraws-from-the-presidential-race/

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The most interesting thing about Marianne Williamson's presidential campaign may be that it did about as well as you'd ordinarily expect a Marianne Williamson campaign to do. The self-help writer and spiritual leader, who suspended her New Age quest for the Democratic nomination on Friday, made a splash in the press and the meme factories by sounding so different from the other candidates. But her poll numbers never climbed above the low single digits, and now she has withdrawn before the voting begins. Apparently, the Oprah constituency isn't enough to win a major party's presidential nod this year. Maybe Oprah herself could do it, but not a mere Oprah guest.

That should not be surprising. Major political parties do not usually hand their national tickets to celebrity candidates who don't have any elected experience. But one of them did just that last time around, and the guy they picked then got elected president. And that experience has thrust some traumatized analysts into a state of epistemic nihilism, as though they can't entirely rule out the possibility that the Democrats will nominate an AI and the Republicans will nominate Bernie Sanders.

....

Another one bites the dust.

 

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Mr. Booker is out, they are now dropping like flies:  https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/13/politics/cory-booker-ends-presidential-race/index.html

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Sen. Cory Booker announced Monday that he will end his campaign after failing to qualify for the Democratic debate planned for Tuesday in Iowa.

"It was a difficult decision to make, but I got in this race to win, and I've always said I wouldn't continue if there was no longer a path to victory," Booker said in an email to supporters Monday.
 
The New Jersey Democrat's announcement came a day before six presidential candidates will participate in the CNN/Des Moines Register's debate in Des Moines, Iowa. He did not qualify for the event. It also came as the Senate gears up for the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump.
 
"Our campaign has reached the point where we need more money to scale up and continue building a campaign that can win -- money we don't have, and money that is harder to raise because I won't be on the next debate stage and because the urgent business of impeachment will rightly be keeping me in Washington," Booker wrote.

 

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