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


swordfish

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https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/435520-buttigieg-surges-to-third-place-in-new-iowa-poll

South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D) surged into third place in a poll of the Iowa caucus released Sunday.

Eleven percent of likely Democratic Iowa caucusgoers surveyed by Emerson Polling said they would pick Buttigieg to be their 2020 presidential nominee.

Overall, Buttigieg placed third behind Former Vice President Joe Biden, at 25 percent, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), at 24 percent.

The only other candidate to receive double-digit support was Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), who was the choice for 10 percent of respondents.

"The biggest surprise in this poll is Mayor Pete, last week we saw him inching up in our national poll, and now he’s in double digits in Iowa, America is going to be asking who is 'Mayor Pete'?" Spencer Kimball, director of the Emerson Poll, said.

Buttigieg, who has formed an exploratory committee but has not officially declared, was polling at 0 percent in Emerson's January survey of Iowa, which shows his recognition and support have grown significantly in the last few months.

The Indiana mayor's campaign cleared the donations threshold to participate in presidential debates earlier this month.

His performance in Sunday's Emerson poll was boosted by placing second in the 18-to-29-year-old demographic, with 22 percent. Sanders led that category with 44 percent.

“If Buttigieg is able to maintain his momentum, his candidacy appears to be pulling from the same demographic of young voters as Sanders, and that could become a problem for Sanders,” Kimball said.

Emerson surveyed 249 likely Iowa Democratic caucusgoers between March 21 and 24. The margin of error for the sample is 6.2 percentage points. 

 

So if Mayor Pete stays in, it appears he becomes a problem for Bernie........How long will the Dems let him stay?  OR - will they keep him around to bring Bernie down enough for Biden to surge?  Funny thing is, neither Mayor Pete nor Biden has officially announced yet.....

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I watched Mayor Pete on a town hall meeting on CNN. I was very impressed. At that time, I thought this is by far the most formidable opponent to Trump that is running so far. He is not a career politician, is a veteran, is highly intelligent, and communicates very well. I think he could alsopick up support from a group I think will be the X factor in 2020; the Republicans who do not like Trump. 

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26 minutes ago, Irishman said:

I watched Mayor Pete on a town hall meeting on CNN. I was very impressed. At that time, I thought this is by far the most formidable opponent to Trump that is running so far. He is not a career politician, is a veteran, is highly intelligent, and communicates very well. I think he could alsopick up support from a group I think will be the X factor in 2020; the Republicans who do not like Trump. 

But I don't think many principled Republicans/conservatives would go for Mr. Buttigieg's support of the Green New Deal and Medicare For All.

 

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Pete Buttigieg: Tortured Libertarian: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/politics-ideas/pete-buttigieg-tortured-libertarian/

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At the risk of undermining his appeal to the liberal Democratic primary electorate, it is hard not to appreciate what Pete Buttegieg has brought to the 2020 presidential race.

The mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Buttegieg does not hold an office that traditionally serves as a springboard to the presidency. But then, neither did the current president. Buttegieg is thoughtful, even intellectual. He’s a Rhodes scholar, attended the University of Oxford, served his country in the Navy and was deployed to Afghanistan, and worked in the private sector before returning to his hometown where he took up politics. He’s a married gay man, but he has steadfastly refused to become mired in the Democrats’ woke-off, and he’s managed to avoid engaging with his fellow presidential candidates in the culture war’s unwinnable arms race.

And while his fellow presidential aspirants are pandering to the lowest common denominator, promising the world and ignoring constitutional impediments, Pete Buttegieg is talking about ideas. Among them, the very concept of liberty itself.

....

But Buttegieg’s libertarianism knows some rather confusing bounds. “We know that your neighbor can make you unfree,” he said. Okay, true enough. The essential purpose of law is to preserve the boundary between where your rights end and those of another begin. “Justice is the end of government,” James Madison wrote in Federalist 51. “It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.” In sum, it is liberty that must be the primary consideration. When it conflicts with justice, it is liberty that must prevail because, without freedom, there is no justice. It sounds like the mayor has a solid grasp on what constitutes freedom. At least, right up until he lost the plot.

“Your cable company can make you unfree,” he said. Here, the mayor demonstrates his Democratic bona fides and exposes why Democrats are not going to be “the party of freedom” anytime soon. The conservative/libertarian definition of “freedom from” is almost exclusively negative. Their “freedom from” is freedom from activities that impose obligations on other parties. Democrats, too, endorse a form of “freedom from,” but the rights they advocate are positive; they impose obligations on neighbors, associations, and the state to provide certain conditions that constitute what they subjectively define as optimal outcomes—not merely opportunity.

Since Franklin Delano Roosevelt articulated the notion that Americans should enjoy “freedom from want,” the Democratic Party’s idealized conception of liberty has conflicted with the ideals articulated by the Founding generation. If you believe that your cable company can make you unfree, you have adopted an expansive definition of what constitutes freedom that now includes voluntary association. That’s a definition of freedom the Founders would not recognize.

This philosophical inclination likely informs Buttegieg’s hostility toward the concept of “regulatory capture.” That’s the idea that powerful corporate interests can reach a point of critical mass where they begin to execute undue influence over local, state, and federal government, avoid the scrutiny of their sympathetic overseers, and defer their operating costs with taxpayer-provided benefits. This is surely a problem, but it’s one that is the product of a government large enough to distribute those benefits without incurring the voters’ wrath. What do these interests want from the clientelism? Protection from competition. The answer, then, to regulatory capture isn’t to increase the number of hostage regulators, but to decrease these agencies’ capacity to deliver for their captors.

Buttegieg is a thoughtful politician, and his intellectual journey seems to have led him halfway to small government libertarianism. Perhaps nothing better illustrates this internal conflict better than his response when asked where he stands on fast-food chain Chick-Fil-A, whose owners oppose same-sex marriages like his own. “I do not approve of their politics, but I kind of approve of their chicken,” he said. “Maybe, if nothing else, I can build that bridge.” Maybe he can, but it doesn’t seem like the modern Democratic Party wants any hand in its construction.

 

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1 hour ago, Muda69 said:

One thing about PB - he is incredibly intelligent, and if at all possible will not let himself get pigeon-holed into a character of folly in the Democrat Party.  SF doesn't hardly align at all with his Liberal/left political views, and absolutely despises the "smart streets" (roundabouts) in South Bend, and don't get me started on "Lime Bikes" (google it) in South Bend where some of the bikes wound up in the river, but I have to respect his demeanor and his ability to sniff out the traps being set for him in the Democrat campaign so far.  He would make a worthy adversary as a counterpart to Pence in the debates if he is unable to get the nomination, but becomes a VP pick.

Here is a humorous take from Trevor Noah:

 

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That was a great and entertaining video. Hard to beat the free publicity. I agree that he would be formidable opponent. He may be a VP candidate this time around, but I would not be surprised to see him emerge as THE candidate. I have to admit the visual of a debate with Pence brought a smile. We know that Pence is a bit socially awkward, and to see him share a stage with an openly gay opponent could be classic. He looked very uncomfortable with the Irish Prime Minister.

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Democratic Dystopias: http://reason.com/archives/2019/03/29/democratic-dystopias

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From his opening campaign declaration that "the American dream is dead," to his creatively capitalized warning just last month that "without strong Borders we don't have a Country," Donald Trump has proven again and again that an apocalyptic style works in contemporary American politics.

The president's 2020 challengers, alas, have followed Trump's lead.

"We are at an inflection point in in the history of our world," Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) pronounced when kicking off her candidacy in January. "We are here because the American dream and our American democracy are under attack and on the line like never before."

Voters in the 1864 primaries might beg to differ, but that's not stopping the presidential primary field from serial declarations of catastrophe.

"Today, millions and millions and millions of American families are … struggling to survive in a system that has been rigged by the wealthy and the well-connected," Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said last month when announcing her presidential bid. "Millions of families can barely breathe."

Imagine the tracheal stress if unemployment was above 4%!

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has been hurling paranoiac thunderbolts at the "oligarchy" for as long as he's been in politics. "We have created a system which is basically out of control," he lamented in February to CBS' John Dickerson, which is why "Now it's time to complete that revolution."

We have grown accustomed to politicians of both parties, especially those not in power, drastically overselling what Barack Obama (channeling Martin Luther King) was fond of calling the "fierce urgency of now" — calls to action that need immediate attention — usually in the form of voting for the politician sounding the alarm. Republicans heading into the 2016 election breathed a manic new energy into the tradition, beginning with Trump's first rant about Mexican "rapists," which set off a bidding war to see who could bring the most crazy to the visa-policy debate. (My favorite came from first generation Indian American Bobby Jindal: "Immigration without assimilation is an invasion.")

With his bottomless reservoir of hellscape hyperbole, Trump demonstrated daily that the apocalyptic style was a ticket in alienated America for leapfrogging more staid establishment politicians.

Those conservative intellectuals who didn't leap off the Trump train learned by the time of his nomination to love the hyperbole, including most notably in the Claremont Review of Books' "Flight 93 Election." That article, written under a pseudonym by Michael Anton, who later joined and then left the Trump administration, analogized a Hillary Clinton presidency to a plane hijacked by suicidal terrorists. "Charge the cockpit or you die," Anton counseled. "You may die anyway. … [But] if you don't try, death is certain."

Since every winning strategy in America's two-party political system ends up being copied by the losing side, the Democrats' march toward a paranoid dystopia should not surprise.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank) has been amply rewarded in the media ecosystem for making casual suggestions that the president of the United States is working for another team. Fellow committee member Eric Swalwell (D-Dublin) told Vanity Fair in January that "over the last six months, there has only been more evidence that the president has been acting on Russia's behalf."

And if early response to the Mueller report summary is any guide, don't expect much left-of-center walkback from the past two years of increasingly conspiratorial speculation about Trump/Russia.

Heading into 2020, we should expect more and louder howling into the wind, even from the most professionally upbeat 2020 Democrats.

"Society does not value work anymore," Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) warned in South Carolina on Saturday. "We have a real crisis in this country over financial stability."

Even Beto O'Rourke, in between countertop jumps and motivational rah-rah, is accessing the dark side. "The civil war in Syria, the wildfires in California — we literally are making it happen," the toothsome Texan said in New Hampshire last week. "And unless we act in the next 12 years … there will be a hell visited upon our kids and grandkids and the generations that follow."

Why do people talk like this? Because it speaks to our species. Humans are hardwired to believe that the sky will fall, no matter how much cleaner, healthier and richer our environs become over time. Our evolutionary parents and grandparents, after all, survived precisely because they suspected that that rattle in the bushes might well be a sabertooth tiger.

But the moral of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" is not that there is no wolf, but rather that warnings should be saved for when the beast actually arrives. The president's apocalyptic fantasia is disreputable on its face, and leads to bad policies. Democrats should resist the temptation to emulate what they despise.

But the Democratic side of the uni-party won't resist the temptation.  If you can't beat 'em then join 'em.

 

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On 3/25/2019 at 10:42 AM, Muda69 said:

But I don't think many principled Republicans/conservatives would go for Mr. Buttigieg's support of the Green New Deal and Medicare For All.

 

Yes, because principled conservatives/Republicans would never vote for any candidate or elected official who'd support those ideas or other lib notions like imposing high trade tariffs or running up huge federal budget deficits.... 

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3 minutes ago, Wabash82 said:

Yes, because principled conservatives/Republicans would never vote for any candidate or elected official who'd support those ideas or other lib notions like imposing high trade tariffs or running up huge federal budget deficits.... 

Yep, more evidence to vote for a third party candidate instead of the uni-party.  Or not vote at all.

 

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18 minutes ago, Muda69 said:

Yep, more evidence to vote for a third party candidate instead of the uni-party.  Or not vote at all.

 

You tout this often, but I'm not seeing voting third-party as somehow being a magic bullet to the woes of a mainly two-party system.  It makes a very big leap to assume that because someone doesn't have a D or R behind their name that they are somehow all of a sudden pure political moralists.  As Lord Acton was quoted, "Power tends to corrupt ..."  We already have evidence of folks who are third-party or third-party relativists and they are often considered extremists.  Recall that Sanders is an independent, but I don't see third-party folks here on GID jumping to support his views in total.  AOC is similar in the sense that she's even further away from mainstream Democrats and so might also be considered a third-party-lite person too.  Rand Paul is third-party-lite, but he's not exactly been the poster guy for third-party support.  I mean Romney has a better record voting against Trump than Paul does and Romney's mainstream GOP.   About the closest one to being more third-partyish might be someone like Angus King from Maine.  Also, given that third-party candidates come in all flavors, voting third-party in general "just because" seems almost as flawed as voting straight ticket.  It would seem similar to voting for someone from Texas when the current White House occupant is from New York because Texas and New York are different.  

I've voted third party before, but it didn't have much to do with the idea that the person wasn't D or R; it was tied to the person.  Similarly, I've voted R before too.  Again, in the analysis of doing so, it was tied to the person and not the letter behind their name.

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31 minutes ago, foxbat said:

You tout this often, but I'm not seeing voting third-party as somehow being a magic bullet to the woes of a mainly two-party system.  It makes a very big leap to assume that because someone doesn't have a D or R behind their name that they are somehow all of a sudden pure political moralists.  As Lord Acton was quoted, "Power tends to corrupt ..."  We already have evidence of folks who are third-party or third-party relativists and they are often considered extremists.  Recall that Sanders is an independent, but I don't see third-party folks here on GID jumping to support his views in total.  AOC is similar in the sense that she's even further away from mainstream Democrats and so might also be considered a third-party-lite person too.  Rand Paul is third-party-lite, but he's not exactly been the poster guy for third-party support.  I mean Romney has a better record voting against Trump than Paul does and Romney's mainstream GOP.   About the closest one to being more third-partyish might be someone like Angus King from Maine.  Also, given that third-party candidates come in all flavors, voting third-party in general "just because" seems almost as flawed as voting straight ticket.  It would seem similar to voting for someone from Texas when the current White House occupant is from New York because Texas and New York are different.  

I've voted third party before, but it didn't have much to do with the idea that the person wasn't D or R; it was tied to the person.  Similarly, I've voted R before too.  Again, in the analysis of doing so, it was tied to the person and not the letter behind their name.

I haven't encountered anyone at the national level in the past 30 years with a uni-party designation that I believed deserved my vote.  When that person comes along I'll let you know.

 

 

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https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273361/mayor-buttigieg-runs-president-while-his-city-daniel-greenfield?fbclid=IwAR1-_i2HOqlIf1dByKfNh6wtakYzFUaQAE4bf_a-Q8x5UgP1KUtXE-mxDtk

On March 31, a South Bend grandma brought her grandson to the hospital. The 11-month-old baby boy had been shot. His grandmother’s car had also taken fire. It was another early morning in South Bend.

Around the same time, Mayor Buttigieg, was toting up the $7 million in donations from his charm offensive as his bid for the 2020 Democrat nomination got underway. The national media never bothered reporting the shooting of an 11-month-old boy in the city he was supposed to be running, but instead confined its coverage of South Bend matters to a publicity stunt wedding officiated by Buttigieg.

The horrifying shooting of an 11-month-old boy on the millennial mayor’s watch was not an unusual incident. In the last few days, even as the media was gushing over Buttigieg’s presidential ambitions, two Indiana University South Bend players were injured in a shooting on Notre Dame Avenue, a blind date ended in a shooting, and yet another shooting added to the bloody toll in the real South Bend.

Those are quite a few shootings for a city of barely 100,000 people. But South Bend is a violent place.

While Chicago is notorious for its murder rate, in 2015, Buttigieg’s South Bend actually topped Chicago’s 16.4 homicides per 100,000 people with a homicide rate of 16.79 per 100,000 people. Those numbers put Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s city on the list of the top 30 murder capitals in the country for the year.

In January, three shootings in one week killed two teens and left a woman paralyzed from the waist down. In one summer week, the casualties included a 12 and a 13-year-old. Last year, a man shot 6 people when he opened fire on 50 partygoers in a house and was sentenced to 100 years in jail.

By 2017, shootings had risen 20% on Mayor Buttigieg’s watch. Rapes increased 27% and aggravated assaults rose from 183 in 2013, the year before Buttigieg took office, to a stunning 563 assaults.

It’s hard to know which are flying faster, bullets in South Bend or dollars into Buttigieg’s campaign.

Some of these stories, particularly the recent shootings of two baseball players which shocked Indiana University, should have been covered by the national media, which instead chose to broadcast Buttigieg’s publicity stunt of officiating at a pregnant woman’s wedding in a hospital. Had the media stuck around, it could have reported on the trail of shooting victims making their way into the hospital.

But reporting on an 11-month-old being shot in their hot new candidate’s city wouldn’t be as much fun.

The media’s bias has never been subtle, but its disinterest in a presidential candidate’s track record has never been this blatant. Mayor Buttigieg’s candidacy is being covered as if he weren’t the mayor of an actual city with actual problems. Instead his prospects have been covered purely in terms of his identity, a gay millennial, his past career before taking office, and his current witticisms and applause lines.

At no point in time does the media stop to tell the viewers and readers it is regaling with stories of Mayor Buttigieg’s charm that he runs the most dangerous city in Indiana, recently rated as one of the “worst cities to live”, where nearly half the residents live at the poverty level, and even the water is bad.

These are significant data points in the track record of a politician aspiring to run the entire country.

The media keeps asking Mayor Buttigieg which of its wishlist of radical socialist policies he’s willing to sign on to, the Green New Deal, eliminating private health insurance, and freeing more convicts, rather than asking him which policies he used to try and solve problems in South Bend. And how they worked.

Mayor Pete Buttigieg has tried to pass off South Bend’s crime problem as a national issue. But South Bend’s violent crime rates, double the Indiana and American average, run counter to national trends.

Buttigieg responded by doubling down on Group Violence Intervention, a trendy community outreach strategy to gang members, which despite being widely touted by the media, doesn’t work. Gimmicks, ranging from AI to wonkery, were rolled out and the shootings, the rapes and assaults have continued.

Mayor Buttigieg excels at buzzwords and gimmicks. He’s just terrible at actually running a city.

That’s why property crime in South Bend is rising. It’s why the city is overrun with gangs. It’s why South Bend is poor, blighted and miserable. Violence is just one of the many symptoms of Buttigieg’s failures.

South Bend’s top employers are the local schools and hospitals, and the local government. And a local casino. Unemployment and taxes are higher than average. Meanwhile the average income is below $20,000. The poverty rate is 25%. African-American poverty rates are double. Hispanic poverty rates are 10% higher than the national average. And even Asian-Americans are poorer than usual in South Bend.

Buttigieg’s failed city is a tragic counterpart to Lake Wobegon where everything is below average.

The media has ignored the reality in South Bend while touting Buttigieg as a rival for the hearts of Rust Belt voters. But Buttigieg hasn’t won by winning over traditional Rust Belt voters. South Bend’s white population has dropped steadily on his watch and the city is on track for majority minority status. The remaining white population is skewed toward a white lefty elite coming for its educational institutions.

South Bend isn’t a typical Rust Belt city. It’s a typical blue city, divided sharply between poor minorities and a leftist elite without any of the culture or tech industries that keep New York or Los Angeles going. Its traditional population has been leaving steadily and that departure only accelerated during Buttigieg’s disastrous time in office.

Much has been made of Buttigieg winning reelection by 80%. This isn’t a testament to his unique charisma. Democrats have had a lock on the mayorality in South Bend for two generations.

The media cheers that Buttigieg won 80% of the vote. It neglects to mention that it was 8,515 votes. That’s about the 8,369 votes that came in during the primaries. Buttigieg raised $337,161 dollars while his Republican opponent, Kelly Jones, had raised $584 dollars. The millennial wunderkind needed $40 bucks a vote while his unknown Republican opponent managed at around a quarter a vote.

Like South Bend’s poverty and crime statistics, these are figures that the media doesn’t report because it would reveal that their shiny new candidate is a hollow façade with nothing inside except spin.

Mayor Buttigieg isn’t winning 80% because he’s universally beloved. That percentage isn’t a testament to his popularity, but to a political system in which hardly anybody except a few lefties bothers to vote.

The truth about “Mayor Pete” is that he’s the son of a Marxist prof working in Notre Dame who used the death throes of a dying city to polish his brand and then jump into the 2020 race over dead bodies.

South Bend is a human tragedy. And while Buttigieg isn’t solely responsible for his woes, he has exploited it, instead of trying to fix it, using buzzwords and gimmicks to build a national brand.

That’s something he has in common with fellow failed hipster mayor and 2020 candidate, Cory Booker.

But Senator Booker was at least clever enough to put a little distance between his tenure in Newark and his 2020 bid. Mayor Buttigieg is betting that the national media won’t bother looking at South Bend.

So far he’s been proven right.

The media keeps touting Buttigieg’s Ivy League credentials, his identity as a gay politician, and his charm. When it mentions South Bend, it’s only to claim that he “turned it around” and that he won his last election by 80%. South Bend hasn’t been turned around. Downtown has gotten a hipster revamp, while the rest of South Bend chokes on crime, violence and misery. But Buttigieg knows that the national media will never bother doing more than reporting on new bike paths and an organic grocery.

The 11-month-old boy who came into the hospital with a wound in his shoulder won’t catch their eye. But as Mayor Buttigieg keeps raising money hand over fist, South Bend continues to bleed and die.

And Buttigieg is hoping that he can sneak into the White House before the blood gets on his hands.

Those of us near to South Bend already know this.  South Bend has (even before Mayor Pete) been crime-ridden.  He just didn't do much to fix that, except for Round-abouts and Smart Streets......and Lime Bikes.....Trendy........

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It appears that Mr. Buttigieg isn't "gay enough" for some people on the left:  https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/03/pete-buttigieg-gay-diversity-white-male-candidate.html

The insanity on the Left. He’s gay, but is he gay enough? He’s openly gay in an openly gay marriage, but is he gay enough? What else does he need to do, be dancing onstage during the debates in a tutu? Does the left want a mockery of a stereotype or something?

 

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2 hours ago, Muda69 said:

It appears that Mr. Buttigieg isn't "gay enough" for some people on the left:  https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/03/pete-buttigieg-gay-diversity-white-male-candidate.html

The insanity on the Left. He’s gay, but is he gay enough? He’s openly gay in an openly gay marriage, but is he gay enough? What else does he need to do, be dancing onstage during the debates in a tutu? Does the left want a mockery of a stereotype or something?

 

Welcome to identity politics.....

Mayor Pete is very intelligent, so it is sad (but it was pretty predictable) to see him sink into the mire of national politics like he is doing.  The City of South Bend and him (professionally) have benefited immensely due to his previous relationship first with Governor(s) Pence and now Holcomb and the Republicans that pretty much controlled Indiana politics.  It was amazing to see him work effectively and successfully in that environment.  I had hoped he would avoid identity politics and point to his bipartisanship working with the other side, but he is falling into the role the DNC would like him to play - the alter-ego to Mike Pence - who will absolutely crush him if he continues this path.

 

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45 minutes ago, swordfish said:

Welcome to identity politics.....

Mayor Pete is very intelligent, so it is sad (but it was pretty predictable) to see him sink into the mire of national politics like he is doing.  The City of South Bend and him (professionally) have benefited immensely due to his previous relationship first with Governor(s) Pence and now Holcomb and the Republicans that pretty much controlled Indiana politics.  It was amazing to see him work effectively and successfully in that environment.  I had hoped he would avoid identity politics and point to his bipartisanship working with the other side, but he is falling into the role the DNC would like him to play - the alter-ego to Mike Pence - who will absolutely crush him if he continues this path.

 

Mike Pence will crush him? Or are you referring to something/someone else? Didn't follow that statement....

In what I have seen of him so far, Mayor Pete (not gonna commit to trying to spell that last name accurately) seems to be minimizing the identity politics aspects of his sexual orientation and positioning himself more broadly as the candidate who is "just as progressive, but also much more practical" than Bernie,  or Corey, or Kamala, or Elizabeth, etc., with a "plus, I'm a millennial, so I think like you" ("you" as in second largest voting bloc demographically) kicker, to separate himself from the other (older) candidates with executive office experience. 

I see his recent statements related to Pence's purported view of gay people as a framing mechanism for the pitch he eventually has to make successfully to the many Americans who are still uncertain in how they "feel" about homosexuals: the folks who 20 to 15 years ago firmly believed gay people were "perverts", equivalent to pedophiles, but who have come to discover in the last decade or so that there seem to be a heck of a lot of "normal" gay people.

He has to convince those people that he's gay because that's how God made him, and while he is not ashamed or embarrassed of it, it is also just one of many components of the person God made him to be; it is not the animating "force" of what he is about, as a person or as a politician, any more than the fact that God made them heterosexual defines who they are.  

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Bernie Sanders Is a Millionaire. That’s Great!: https://reason.com/2019/04/15/bernie-sanders-is-a-millionaire-thats-great/

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If I had a dollar for every time Bernie Sanders has inveighed against “millionaires and billionaires,” I’d be…well, still probably not as rich as Bernie Sanders, who revealed last week that he is now a millionaire. Sanders’ newfound wealth is due in part to the success of his book, Our Revolution, which earned him roughly $885,000 in 2017 after hitting number three on the New York Times best-seller list, a fact about which Sanders is justly pleased.

“I wrote a best-selling book,” he said, explaining how he ended up at the high end of America’s wealth spectrum. “If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.

That’s right—and that’s how it should be.

Sanders spent years building himself and his name into a successful national brand by identifying and filling a relatively unique niche in the market for national politics. Based on the success of that brand, he then negotiated a deal with a publisher to bring a product—his book—to market. The product sold well, and Sanders, who had invested a significant amount of personal time in conceiving and producing the product, reaped the financial rewards. Now he’s better off, and I suspect that he, at least, would argue that the people who bought his book are better off too. Everyone wins.

Sanders, in other words, was acting as an entrepreneur, a person who made something new in the world, something for which there turned out to be considerable market demand. And Sanders clearly feels no shame about earning a large return on his labor as a result.

Folks, that’s capitalism. Whether he means to or not, Bernie is making an argument for the existence of rich capitalists, and for the value they bring to the world. And it’s an argument that both could and should extend beyond book writing to, say, the founders and inventors behind some of the nation’s most successful businesses, some of whom have made a lot more than $885,000. If, just for example, you start an online bookstore that eventually revolutionizes the entire retail sector, making it incredibly easy to download Sanders’ book to a convenient digital device for just a few bucks, you can be a multi-billionaire too. (Sanders, who blasted Amazon for paying low wages to its distribution center workers, probably made a significant chunk of his book earnings off of Amazon sales.)

But wait a minute—is Sanders really arguing against the existence of millionaires and billionaires? Maybe not explicitly. But by repeatedly singling them out, he was certainly implying that there was something unsavory, something vaguely illegitimate about their existence. And some of Sanders’ fellow democratic socialists have certainly suggested that the very existence of a billion-dollar personal fortune is a moral problem, or a “policy failure.” (The Sanders brand was, in many ways, first to market. But as with many popular products, his success has led to a legion of imitators.)

Maybe, then, there’s a difference between millionaires and billionaires, with the former being a little less objectionable? It’s hard to make a coherent argument that there’s a clear line at which some amount of wealth suddenly becomes unacceptable—that at some point, you’ve sold so many books, and made so much money from doing so, that it’s immoral.

For Sanders, at least, that line seems to be moving. As the folks at ThinkProgress recently noticed in a video, Sanders appears to have become less focused on millionaires and more interested in the problems with billionaires at the same time his own income increased. Perhaps that’s just a coincidence. (Sanders objected to the ThinkProgress video, suggesting it was influenced by corporate money.)

In any case, I think it’s genuinely great that Bernie Sanders is a millionaire, and that in becoming a millionaire, our nation’s most well-known democratic socialist politician has, however inadvertently, started defending one of the core tenets of capitalism—that if you come up with an idea for a product, make that product a reality in the world, and sell it to lots of willing buyers, it’s perfectly just and reasonable for you to earn a lot of money as a result. One can only hope that there are more best-sellers, and more millions, in Sanders’ future.

Congratulations to the capitalist Mr. Sanders on the success of his book and his subsequent millionaire status.     Now which of our GID socialists out there will automatically discount Mr. Sanders as a potential POTUS due to his capitalist success?

 

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On 3/11/2019 at 11:45 AM, Muda69 said:

 

17 hours ago, Wabash82 said:

Mike Pence will crush him? Or are you referring to something/someone else? Didn't follow that statement....

In what I have seen of him so far, Mayor Pete (not gonna commit to trying to spell that last name accurately) seems to be minimizing the identity politics aspects of his sexual orientation and positioning himself more broadly as the candidate who is "just as progressive, but also much more practical" than Bernie,  or Corey, or Kamala, or Elizabeth, etc., with a "plus, I'm a millennial, so I think like you" ("you" as in second largest voting bloc demographically) kicker, to separate himself from the other (older) candidates with executive office experience. 

I see his recent statements related to Pence's purported view of gay people as a framing mechanism for the pitch he eventually has to make successfully to the many Americans who are still uncertain in how they "feel" about homosexuals: the folks who 20 to 15 years ago firmly believed gay people were "perverts", equivalent to pedophiles, but who have come to discover in the last decade or so that there seem to be a heck of a lot of "normal" gay people.

He has to convince those people that he's gay because that's how God made him, and while he is not ashamed or embarrassed of it, it is also just one of many components of the person God made him to be; it is not the animating "force" of what he is about, as a person or as a politician, any more than the fact that God made them heterosexual defines who they are.  

SF predicted back that when the Mayor started posturing like the VP was a problem for him when as Governor because he came out as gay, that would not be a wise move for the Mayor.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Those of us in this area know how the former Governor treated the Mayor, before and after he came out, and how the Mayor was able to work with him and now Governor Holcomb was impressive, more impressive than most of the former Mayors of South Bend.  The Mayor to his credit got a lot accomplished, but would have never been able to do that without help from the State level.  Him making these moves now to find favor within the DNC and the younger voters (IMHO) will come back to bite him and that is where I think the VP relationship will go.

SF thinks his mistake is assuming that any Christian is going to hate him for being gay.  Christians like myself who I feel make up the larger christian voting block can easily forgive what we consider sin.  I believe it's between him and God, and it's his choice.  Him having the line of thinking that God made him that way and advertising that belief will hurt him more in the bible belt than just being gay.  I think THAT is where the DNC wants him to be, and he is falling into that position easily.

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35 minutes ago, TrojanDad said:

I think the question Muda is which GID member(s) will hold his/her breath waiting for Bernie to share his new wealth.........and sign up for Obamacare........

It's obvious Mr. Sanders should now be taxed at 70%.

 

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18 hours ago, TrojanDad said:

I think the question Muda is which GID member(s) will hold his/her breath waiting for Bernie to share his new wealth.........and sign up for Obamacare........

Probably the same ones waiting for resident "libertarians" to pay their fair share of free market road access, etc., Evangelicals to put their vote where their Bible really is, and fiscal conservatives to hold their presidential leader beholden to the party platform.

17 hours ago, Muda69 said:

It's obvious Mr. Sanders should now be taxed at 70%.

 

Sure, why not?  I don't think he'd argue with you.

 

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1 hour ago, foxbat said:

Probably the same ones waiting for resident "libertarians" to pay their fair share of free market road access,

I would happily pay my "fair share" for private, free market road access.  Especially here in Frankfort where the city streets are falling apart while the Mayor and City Council spend millions of taxpayers dollars on a new park,  new pool,  and probably a new police station.

What is the highest income tax rate you are freely willing to pay, foxbat? 

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3 hours ago, Muda69 said:

I would happily pay my "fair share" for private, free market road access.  Especially here in Frankfort where the city streets are falling apart while the Mayor and City Council spend millions of taxpayers dollars on a new park,  new pool,  and probably a new police station.

What is the highest income tax rate you are freely willing to pay, foxbat? 

Fair market or whatever keeps me out of jail  ... whichever is lowest.

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