bleeding aside, uncle joe had eyelid surgery i think

like greta van susteren

this one is very fucking funny

Biden is the most electable candidate, just not right here or right now

By
Alexandra Petri
Columnist

Feb. 10, 2020 at 3:20 p.m. MST

HUDSON, N.H. — It is very clear that what Joe Biden has in spades, what we fear the other candidates may not have, is electability. That is why you should vote for him: because, assuredly, people will vote for him! People currently at your caucus site or polling place are not voting for him yet, but they should, because, as previously stated, he is electable. They should vote for him because he is just the sort of man for whom people will definitely vote. Just not the people right here or right now.

There is a complicated physics to this, which you have to understand. I do not think I am explaining it right. Biden is still the most electable candidate, although he got only the fourth-most votes in Iowa and is polling only fourth best in other places. But that is a misunderstanding. Just because people there in Iowa were not voting for him does not mean he is not electable. They were just trying to show that their state should not be first in the process. Consider how unelectable Elizabeth Warren is — and she got more votes than he did! He will be voted for by people in states such as Pennsylvania and, of course, Ohio and, to be sure, South Carolina and definitely, absolutely Wisconsin and maybe even others! His electability is in the future. He is the one who will bring first this party together, and then the nation!

Also, Republicans will vote for him. When you look at his totals currently, you must mentally add a flotilla of Republicans who have not yet materialized. They are not here now, because this is the Democratic primary, but they will absolutely be here, in the future. You must believe that people will vote for him, in the future! That is what electability means.

Do not get him confused with Iowa victors Bernie Sanders, who is too far left to be electable, or Pete Buttigieg, who seems like he emerged fully formed from an electability vat (which paradoxically makes him less electable). Amy Klobuchar is also running, but you can tell she is less electable than Biden because she got fewer votes than he did in Iowa. Yes, I know that is not how I just said electability worked. Keep up!

Just watch his campaign in action and you will see what electability means. It almost feels like a misnomer to call his rallies “rallies.” He does not need to rally people around him. They are already rallied, convened by his electability.

Instead, in Hudson, a crowd of approximately 600 stood silently in a gymnasium as Biden spoke with increasing fervor about the bewilderment and anger he feels at the trajectory of the country and about how his Cabinet will be sure to include “women and blacks and browns.” The room was deathly still. Someone dressed as a polar bear wordlessly protested fossil fuels. According to the banners, the girls’ basketball team had not won a championship since 1998 — 10 years after his first unsuccessful presidential campaign, 10 years before his next one. Twenty-two years before this one.

But this is what it means to be the ever-electable Joe Biden. To be always running and never quite president, always electable until the race begins. He’s almost at the point where Henry Clay would feel bad for him. And there is so much to Joe — a deep sorrow, decades of experience and a folksiness designed in an era when only certain people got to be folks, less and less serviceable.

“I think his time is past,” Pat Darrin, 73, told me after watching the Hudson rally. But how can his time have passed if it never came? Joe Biden is electable. Just not here, or now. Maybe back then? No, that’s not right. Maybe in the future? Just not right here. Just not right now.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...-or-right-now/

Tonight, the Biden separation continues!

yang and bennet drop out

sad for yang—but who the fuck was bennet? i’ve forgotten, lol.

Candidate Pct. ... Votes
Sanders 27.6% ... 32,614
Buttigieg 23.5 ... 27,721
Klobuchar 19.8 ... 23,363
Warren 9.5 ... 11,253
Biden 8.6 ... 10,177
Total votes from 43.6% of precincts 118,150

bernie ahead as expected, uncle joe is toast vs his expectations, warren also keeps sinking, amy on the rise

bernie has the progressive mantle, for the moderates i think we’ll have a pete/amy battle, and then bloomberg will show up and toss the chessboard out the window

updated:
buttigieg closes the gap, klobuchar gathering momentum, top 3 candidates get same delegate numbers warren/biden also tie with 0

Candidate Pct. ... Votes ... Del.
Sanders 26.1% ... 65,487 ... 6
Buttigieg 24.3 ... 60,874 ... 6
Klobuchar 19.8 ... 49,768 ... 6
Warren 9.4 ... 23,594 ... 0
Biden 8.4 ... 21,049 ... 0
Total votes from 84% of precincts 250,780

rough sums:
progressives 35.5%, 6 delegates
moderates.. 52.5%, 12 delegates

we either need Hunger Games style elections or just like...3months max campaigning. this 1-1.5 year election cycle sucks dick.

i enjoy the horse race. honest.

—

eta: speaking of which: more updates!

Candidate Pct. ... Votes ... Del.
Sanders 26.0 % ... 71,410 ... 9
Buttigieg 24.4 ... 67,044 ... 9
Klobuchar 19.7 ... 54,244 ... 6
Warren 9.3 ... 25,612 ... 0
Biden 8.4 ... 23,022 ... 0
Total votes from 89.3% of precincts 274,785

delegate count:
progressives 9
moderates 15

I'm not paid enough ;)

According to the Vegas sportsbooks, BERNIE is the odds on favorite to represent DEMS in 2020. It was just four years ago when BERNIE was considered an outsider and he was routinely badmouthing Democrats......my oh my how times change!

TRUMP was the biggest winner last night......receiving more votes (doubling Obama’s 2012 votes) than ANY incumbent in granite history!!!

WHO Drops Out First ? ? ?

Elizabeth Warren......peekaboo

or

No Show Joe = Lying Dog Face Pony Soldier

berniesiblings in the news for attacking culinary union 226 after the union published a flyer saying mandatory single payer would destroy their health plan.

https://thenevadaindependent.com/art...-emails-tweets

The politically powerful Culinary Union is punching back at supporters of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who have lashed out at the union after it began distributing a one-pager to members warning that the Democratic presidential hopeful would “end Culinary Healthcare” if elected president.

Culinary Union Secretary-Treasurer Geoconda Arguello-Kline said in a statement Wednesday that Sanders supporters have “viciously attacked” the union since it began distributing a one-pager to union members that takes specific aim at the Vermont senator over his Medicare-for-all policy. The Culinary Union, which provides insurance to 130,000 of its members and their families through a special kind of union health trust, strongly opposes the creation of a single-payer, government-run health insurance system on the grounds that it would eliminate their health plan.


https://thenevadaindependent.com/art...cted-president

The Culinary Union, which provides health insurance to 130,000 workers and their family members through a special trust fund, strongly opposes Medicare for all on the basis that it would eliminate the health insurance they have negotiated for over several decades. Health insurance provided by the Culinary Health Fund is considered to be some of the best in the state, and the union even opened a 60,000-square-foot state-of-the-art health clinic a couple of years ago for its members.

The union, considered an organizing behemoth in the Silver State, has been known to tip the scales in elections in the past. Though the 60,000-member union has not yet decided whether it will endorse in the Democratic presidential primary, the flyer appears to be part of a coordinated campaign ahead of Nevada’s Feb. 22 Democratic presidential primary and shows the union will not be sitting idly by, with or without an endorsement.

Yeah, the casino magnates determined quite some time ago it was better to support unions than to have their workers suffering and ruin the “hospitality industry” there. Union in NV is a good thing. I do not expect employers of any kind, public or private, to pay any $ back to workers if their health care costs are somehow absorbed or subsidized by a govt plan. As a former union employee, SEIU and AFSCME, and a graduate of Washington State University, I personally oppose Medicare for all, and also any free higher education or educational loan excusing ideas that are not means tested.

Some of you know me, and met some of you in person

I am so burned out on politics, I am done with Bernie-Bros calling me names for being a Warren supporter, I frankly just wanna get the fuck out of this country permanently

People lose sight real quick how bad it really is if they have a cushy job and a roof over their head, when you lose that, you see how desperation kicks in

WAR - The Human Disease That Has Claimed Mankind FOREVER!

Sticks & Stones
Spears & Knives
Guns & Cannonballs
Tanks & Planes
Bombs & Missiles
Nerve Gas & Nuclear Weapons...Laser Beans


When Will They Ever Learn ? ? ?

The end of this tape is sounding like a 2nd Chapter Of Act’s church worship service.

I would love to make some old school mixtape magic with it!!!

The degree to which Michael Bloomberg is using his fortune to fundamentally alter & manipulate U.S. politics to his personal advantage extends way beyond ads.......interesting thread that’s worth your time!

This is it, people. Irony is dead.

so beauregard has extended his mental litterbox into this thread too? lol

ANYWAY.

trump surrogates like lung limbaugh have started the shit now about pete buttigieg.

“is america ready to see a gay man as president?” sort of shit

YES. YES WE ARE READY. NOW KINDLY FUCK OFF.

he’s not my preferred candidate in the primaries, but any of the current democrats is better than the traitor in chief presently in office, who is intent of wrecking everything in order to prop up his demented ego

anyway, please continue with the regular programming

Bitey : "the saltiness of the president's taint is an under-rated delicacy."

And I thought irony was alive and well......

interesting to see the dialogue which is cropping up now re: buttigieg being a ‘gay’ candidate totally bereft of queerness. like he’s a gay man who upholds every tenet of heteronormativity, yet uses the ‘gay’ tag as a means of Trojan-horsing relative conservatism.

tldr buttigieg is a rat

/bytey sod off, keep it in the maga chud thread

said “kansas city, kansas” fan with the self-drawn hurricane map

all of these people, regardless of their limitations, operate at a much higher standard than your beloved dotard and your kkk brethren.

Yep.

He came 3rd with LGBT people in Iowa, Bernie came in first with 42% or something. Clearly the queer community can spot a fraud.

I saw this on a Cursed Boomer Memes twitter account lol

Oh the irony







20-PETE-20
She’s A Black Magic Woman And She’s Trying To Make A Devil Out Of Me

And Mayor Pete Banger

At the same time you have a number of Bernie-Bros using homophobic language and insinuation on line towards Buttigieg (Michael Moore went on MSNBC and did a limp-wrist taught towards him as well)

The Queer community is very diverse, and many aren't as comfortable with being pigeoned holes into become a walking stereotype of what it is like to be Queer, be it Fae, Bear, Femme, Butch and everything in-between

mmm but it’s that his queerness is ostensibly meaningless? understand why he might choose to conceal it but again his conservatism/general demeanor speaks to a life in which he’s just a homosexual but it hasn’t shaped him far beyond that? again though that might just be PR, but to me there’s something off about a dude who’s gay who really does not speak to minorities, which is why I would assume people are reaching out to bernie

what do you mean “conceal his queerness”? and how do you arrive to the outlandish judgement that “it hasn’t shaped him”?

sounds like a bunch of malicious speculation to me

“well he’s gay but he’s not really gay”

c’mon.... you know better than to pursue this line

Mike is smoooooooooth


just a spoonful of sugar fish drink......

BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH!


Go back to the Trump flogging thread, stay out of the democrat flogging thread.

I mean in accessorising his homosexuality but also hewing close to almost every tenet of heteronormativity, will qualify that it’s a reach/based on assumption as to the image he’s presenting (as I said) but I find it disconcerting for someone to piggyback off their minority status (“I’m the gay mayor!”) yet totally eschew that perspective in formulating policy. a notional ‘gay candidate’ to me would Ideally entail someone upending traditional political leadership just in actually embodying an intersectional position rather than simply maintaining the status quo.

what I’m saying is he uses queerness as an identity demarcation when in actuality he’s the ‘straightest’ candidate of all

i know what you said the first time, this is just the same problematic judgment recoded in theoryspeak.

“if gay therefore intersectional, else not real gay, per me”

how about

“if black therefore good dancer, else not black” per you?

[eta: black girl who can’t dance: https://www.bustle.com/articles/7149...ite-girls-with ]

i mean, the guy is a child of two academics, high school valedictorian, harvard graduate, rhodes scholar, management consultant, navy intelligence officer, precocious politician, episcopalian convert...

...and you get to decide that because he’s gay he must think and behave in a stereotypical way that you’ve predetermined?

ETA: i should add an explanation of my perspective, having lived in dc, which is a government town and also a bit of a gay mecca, where one gets to meet a lot of socially conservative, traditionalist gay people. a lot of suits and ties and serious business.

a myriad gay professionals work in the federal bureaucracy, all branches of the armed forces, congress, the white house, the courts, nonprofits, lobbies, law firms, city government, etc. it’s a “boring” town—the city population is very liberal, but not a radical one. government workers are concerned with running the government well, not overthrowing it. in fact i had a gay neighbor who worked in the state department, very patriotic guy, who once gave me a talking-to about the dangers of radicalism.

i also had this gay coworker, young, catholic, was heavily into social policy (we worked in an advocacy group), looked very clean-cut, always in a suit, was an athlete, sang in a choir, lived with an older man from the political aristocracy, and was very much a democrat, who came to my office and heard the sonic youth tape i was playing and asked me why i was “listening to that garbage” :D

anyway, yeah, pete is gay and a presidential candidate and fucking brilliant and a practical guy. he also plays guitar with bands and the piano with the symphony—just nothing very avant-garde. get used to it.

THERE’S NO POINT IN FIGHTING
Democratic candidates are wasting their time — and hurting their chances — bickering over policies they’ll never get to implement.

By Julia Ioffe
FEBRUARY 14, 2020

It was a sight to behold: a former vice president, two senators and a former mayor on a stage in New Hampshire a week ago, arguing over the impossible. Would Sen. Bernie Sanders deliver Medicare-for-all immediately, as he promised to do? Would doing so double the federal budget, as former vice president Joe Biden countered? Should they maybe go with Medicare-for-all-who-want-it, as former mayor Pete Buttigieg suggested? It didn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but he has said it would put the United States on a “glide path” to something he called “a Medicare-for-all environment.” And what of the fact, raised by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, that Buttigieg tweeted a pledge two years ago to “indubitably” support Medicare-for-all?

Given what actually happens in the nation’s capital these days, the men and women on the stage may as well have been arguing over the price of unicorn at the local market and how they’d cook it. Set against the current political backdrop, the elaborate policy debates among the candidates seeking the Democratic nomination (Will college be free for everyone, or for everyone but the rich kids? Would a tax on wealth over $50 million be a flat tax or a progressive tax?) feel increasingly delusional.

It’s not just because President Trump, an incumbent in a strong economy, stands a good chance of winning a second term. Even if one of the Democratic candidates were to beat him in November, they would become president, not emperor. As such, they’d have to deal with the Senate, an institution where fast and sweeping legislation is difficult to pass in any scenario, to say nothing of one dominated by Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Using tactics that push the limits of what’s acceptable, he has transformed the chamber from the “cooling saucer” the framers envisioned to a Sub-Zero freezer, a place where 300 bills passed by House Democrats don’t even merit debate, let alone votes, even with the insurance policy of Trump’s veto.

It’s healthy to debate policy, but Democrats aren’t doing it in a vacuum. Research shows that contentious primaries hamper a party’s performance in the general election. Candidates are bickering about blue-sky proposals — with Sanders supporters destroying backsliders, Biden invoking segregationists to insist that legislative compromise works and Buttigieg going after Biden for his vote to invade Iraq 17 years ago — but they’re having a semantic argument. The stalemate moots their differences. The next Democratic president will be lucky to seat a Supreme Court nominee. In a climate of such vicious and total partisan obstruction, the only real issue is electability.

continues here (cookie-regulated paywall)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlo...ll-never-pass/

Julia Ioffe a correspondent for GQ magazine, is at work on a book about Russia.

pete buttigieg goes on fox news and gracefully disembowels terminal case rush limbaugh

https://mobile.twitter.com/FoxNewsSu...61854678396928

symbols please correct me if I'm wrong but you're a heterosexual male so I can get if you don't understand what I'm driving at (and also don't proclaim that you do because it's really not your position to talk out of your arse on this one).

I'm not saying that he has to get up there and twerk to ariana fucking grande, I'm saying that in a perfect world queer people like myself (and for that matter every queer person I know) would at least hope that ideally the first instance of a gay candidate would in some way represent the divergent interests of queer people rather than accessorising his homosexuality while foregoing/ignoring the myriad difficulties that arise therein.

I understand that it's a stepping stone but his approach in appeasing vested interests directly contravenes the wellbeing of queer people who in a majority are marginalised by this system. I'd have no problem if he was just sucking dick behind closed doors and leaving it at that, but for him to proclaim himself a 'gay presidential candidate' should entail him actually respecting the interests of those for whom he considers himself a bastion.

it's really not your place to lecture others on those who they see fit to represent them and their interests, and I think as much is abundantly clear in the skewing of non-heterosexual voters towards sanders.

i may not be gay but i can see you maligning him and accusing him of being inauthentic in order to advance your particular ideology. that just requires basic reading comprehension.

that’s the problem with a lot of bernie supporters and one of the reasons his candidacy risks failing to expand his base beyond the true believers: all the fucking nastiness they generate towards the other candidates alienates potential supporters in the general election.

ah! since you’ve gone there with the “it’s a gay thing, you wouldn’t understand,” then please correct me if i’m wrong but don’t you live at the other end of the earth and couldn’t give 2 fucks about four more years of trump if your preferred foreign leader fails to win? some of us vote and have a lot to lose in the next election. you don’t, therefore it’s not your place to lecture others, etc., per your own rhetoric?

anyway, back to buttigieg: he never presented himself as “the gay candidate, or “the president of gays”. that’s never been his calling card, and it’s not the point of his candidacy, but it makes for a nice straw man for you to attack.

he’s running for president of all americans, and he presents himself always as a millennial. yes, he’s gay, and he’s looking for lgbtq support as someone who wants to expand inclusiveness, but he’s inclusive and not running on a zealot platform. he’s also a christian, wants christian support, he’s also a navy veteran and has a group “veterans for pete,” etc. you get the idea.

also, he only came out as gay in opposition to pence’s religious bigotry law in his state. so, again, his sexual preference has never been his calling card, but he will stand up for it.

while he’s not my number one candidate (i’ll support any of the current nominees in a ranked choice order) this conversation is making me like him more because i can see the obstacles he’s facing.

again, i support any of the current nominees because this is not some intellectual abstraction for me. i actually have skin in the game and don’t appreciate the fact that the mutual destruction of democratic candidates only helps the enemy.

now if you truly care about bernie’s chances please consider stopping the stereotypical berniebro shit-flinging and listen to your candidate. he opened the last debate with a statement along the lines of “we’re going to fully support whoever wins this damn thing.” so please act like you would, rather than insist on poisoning the well.