Politics 2020

[Unorthodox]

https://www.standard.net/news/government/weber-county-move-to-election-day-voting-at-union-station/article_2d8fe875-6717-58d8-9a32-508b67c2315b.html

TLDR:  My county changed the polling locations to just one for the entire county for today.  There were no announcements or info out there that it was happening. 

If you're going to have ONE location, it's about as good as you could pick, being a central hub for most public transport, but it isolates a LOT of the poorer neighborhoods from easy access. 

[Geo]

https://www.standard.net/news/government/weber-county-move-to-election-day-voting-at-union-station/article_2d8fe875-6717-58d8-9a32-508b67c2315b.html

TLDR:  My county changed the polling locations to just one for the entire county for today.  There were no announcements or info out there that it was happening. 

If you're going to have ONE location, it's about as good as you could pick, being a central hub for most public transport, but it isolates a LOT of the poorer neighborhoods from easy access.

What'ya think? An attempt to let more people stay home instead of going to the Democratic pre-election?

[Unorthodox]

I honestly don’t get it.  I’ll wait for the aclu to issue their report on it.  It was labeled an experiment for the real thing. 

[Buster's Uncle]

Hard to imagine what else it could be in a redder-than-red state...

[Buster's Uncle]

 

[Unorthodox]

Hard to imagine what else it could be in a redder-than-red state...

Doesn’t quite track when the single location is the heart of downtown ogden with the low income housing and alienating the more rural areas the typically are more red.

[Lorizael]

Yeah.

[Buster's Uncle]

Brutha!

I have the satisfaction of I voted for who I thought would make the best president.  Too many people have and still are overthinking it, which is why Democrats have been losers for the last 40 years.

[Buster's Uncle]

P.S.   

[Buster's Uncle]

How Joe Biden Can Reach Progressives

If Democrats nominate Biden, he will need progressives’ support to beat Donald [Sleezebag]. Here’s how he can get it.

by Noah Berlatsky
Mar 6


I’m a lefty socialist progressive, and like most lefty socialist progressives, I don’t much like Joe Biden. He was a segregationist in the 1970s, when he fought against busing and school integration. In 1988, he ran for president and plagiarized comments by a British Labour leader. In 1991, as head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he helped put Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court when the nominee’s colleague Anita Hill accused him of sexual assault. He’s been bad on mass incarceration. He helped push through a law making it impossible to file for bankruptcy on student loans, supercharging the student debt crisis. He won’t stop putting his hands on women in public. I could go on.

Given his record, there is no way I and most other progressives will be enthusiastic about voting for Biden in November if he consolidates his lead and wins the primary. But there are things he could do that would make me feel simply resigned and melancholy rather than actively tormented by the thought of having to pull the lever for him.

Biden admittedly is doing well in the primary without much support from Sanders or Warren voters. But the general election will be tough and more progressive support might help him with fundraising. Sanders impressively raised $34.5 million from small donors in the last three months of 2019. Reaching out to the left could also help Biden with younger voters. Sanders crushed Biden 65% to 11% among voters under 30 in Texas, and 72% to 5% percent in California early tallies.

So what could Biden do to appeal to the left? First of all, he could start talking and acting like he cares about their concerns. If he would stop gratuitously insulting poor and marginalized millennials, that would be a start. It would also be great if he would listen to, and respond respectively to, the concerns of activists and advocates. He’s been promising to put out a disability plan for months, but it’s still AWOL, to the great frustration of the disability community.

To get progressive votes, Biden could start by asking for them. His team has not made much effort to do that.

Even better than asking progressives for their votes is thanking them for their work. The best way to do that is to adopt some of their policies and priorities. Obviously, Biden isn’t going to adopt the Sanders/Warren platform wholesale. But it would mean a lot to me, and I think to other people on the left, if he took one or two of their proposals and made them his own.

I would love, for example, to see Biden adopt Elizabeth Warren’s 2 percent wealth tax on fortunes over 50 million. Soaking the very rich is an extremely popular proposal, and not just with leftists. It has a 50 percent approval rating among Republicans, and would allow Biden to draw a stark contrast with real estate heir Donald [Sleezebag]. The tax would generate some $4 trillion in income that could be used to fund Sanders’ free college proposal, or perhaps Warren’s exciting proposal for universal child care.

Hillary Clinton said that one of her regrets from 2016 was not embracing a shoot-the-moon, ambitious, inspiring progressive proposal as a campaign centerpiece (she was thinking in particular of universal basic income). There’s no reason for Biden to make the same mistake when Sanders, Warren, and others have proposed so many excellent progressive ideas during the primary.

Another obvious olive branch to progressives would be the vice presidency. VP picks often aim to appeal to certain demographic or geographic constituencies. But after Sanders’ strong showing two cycles in a row, it’s past time to give a progressive a shot at the office, and at a stronger presidential bid down the road. And much as a northerner might consider adding a someone from the south for electoral benefit, Biden can shore up an electoral weakness with a VP who appeals to the left.

Sanders and Warren themselves are both perhaps too old to serve as VP for the 77-year-old Biden. But former HUD secretary and current Warren surrogate Julian Castro would be an excellent choice. So would California Congressman and Sanders surrogate Ro Khanna. Even if the vice presidency goes elsewhere, it could help if Biden indicated some willingness to put Warren, Sanders, or other progressives — like, for example, Sanders supporter and surrogate, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — in his cabinet.

Finally, it would help Biden a great deal with progressives if he occasionally spoke as if he understood the urgency of our current moment. Faced with a Republican party that has cosigned the president’s efforts to solicit foreign election interference, and has actively tried to deny their own constituents healthcare, Biden has responded with chipper appeals to bipartisanship and vague gestures at conciliation. He claims the Republican party will return to decency if only [Sleezebag] is voted out of office. He’s made noises about choosing a Republican running mate. He’s repeatedly said he wants to return politics to “normal.”

Some of these appeals are panders, not promises. There’s little chance a Republican would agree to run on a Democratic ticket, as Biden surely knows. But still, Biden seems most comfortable speaking the language of conciliation, and this is not a conciliatory time. Republicans are engaging in ambitious voter suppression efforts. [Sleezebag] is filling the courts with judges who refuse to hold the executive even minimally accountable. Meanwhile the world barrels towards a climate crisis, and right-wing authoritarian governments gain strength around the globe.

[Sleezebag] has done serious, frightening damage to our democracy. We need a president who will take aggressive steps not just to fix the damage, but to make sure those responsible are not able to do even worse the next time they get into office.

Progressives are not excited about Joe Biden because he seems to want only to beat [Sleezebag]. But we want, at the very least, to make future Trumps impossible. If Biden could bring himself to say that, he’d go some way towards reconciling progressives to his presidency.

https://arcdigital.media/how-joe-biden-can-reach-progressives-85cbfdd2f9f4?source=friends_link&sk=57ee7b44d6cee4181c7d7afa6adc22e6&gi=84d4ba910831

[Unorthodox]

Republican running mate?   Biden/Romney?   

[ColdWizard]

I'm not sure that Biden knows what state he's in at any given moment or which office he's running for.

[Buster's Uncle]

I really dunno.  Like, there's certainly vids going around showing him tripping over his tongue a lot like he's going stupid.  No doubt. 

-But, on the other hand, this is JOE BIDEN we're talking about - tripping over his tongue/misspeaking is sorta his signature going decades back.

-And on the gripping hand, dementia often creeps in, and exacerbating a mental blind spot already in place, subtly at first, would be typical.

---

I say this as someone who's been upset for days that we're probably getting Joe forced on us.  But not only has he honestly already been that tongue-tied way for a very long time, I do hope it's not the case, for all our sakes.

[Unorthodox]

Eh.  Just imagine how gripping the debate will be with two incoherent ramblers on stage. 

I've been my normal disinterested self for most of this.  I don't tend to get emotionally tied to politics as a general rule. 

I was genuinely intrigued by Bloomberg's overall buy the election strategy, and wholly annoyed for about 2 weeks where you couldn't turn around without seeing his ads.  I'm also genuinely pleased it failed so utterly. 

I respect the strategy of the more conservative members swiftly consolidating to a single candidate when Bernie was gaining such a lead, and rather fascinated it worked so damn well. 

I'll be honest.  I don't see hunchback bernie getting elected in this television age.  If Aro wasn't so damn busy I might have him make a hunchack bernie cartoon even.  He both looks and sounds like he's half in the grave.  As much as I might think he's the better candidate for the country, I just don't see it.  And Biden has been too boring to be a legitimate candidate since forever.  He's not going to energize anything beyond anyone-but-[Sleezebag] votes. 

[Buster's Uncle]

I saw someone say on Twitter -I've been following some liberals screaming on Twitter lately, of which I have a lot to say soon if I can work up the energy- Thursday, that it felt a lot like the day after The Pig was 'elected'.

-^That^, yes, if only one tenth as intense.  I did not, because it hurt so much, talk about politics to a single soul for about six months.  Some of us, Bernie got our hopes up that the rightward drift in the Democratic Party, decades old, might finally be arrested.  It's not about Sanders/Warren, though the latter is FANTASTIC and the former quite good - it's not about Joe being a mediocre hack; it's about the people trying to steer the party back into proper opposition being bulldozed by the Republican Lite wing on behalf of the mediocre hack.

And Lori's right; even Dr. Warren is too old.  This country has drifted into a very bad place, Obama gets called a socialist when he's barely even a Democrat, we still openly torture, and a geriatric who will. not. FIX. things is not an acceptable alternative to the Pig wallowing in his own [poop] and lying about an epidemic, killing people among endless other outrages.

I'm turning out to vote for the rat sorbet -featuring LESS rat- in November, the fix being in, make no mistake.

But not as bad isn't good enough.  We can do better.  We MUST.