“If you find a good solution and become attached to it, the solution may become your next problem.”
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Bernie Sanders on the way forward:
Sanders is completely right.
Clinton's campaign, both in the primary and the general, was "top down". She was the candidate of the connected insiders (i.e. the elitist ruling political class), all the Wall Street money , virtually all of corporate America, big unions (but not the working rank and file members), and last but not least the elitist corporate media (who got it so very, very wrong)
Doesn't sound like the "Party of the People" to me.
Huzzah. Bernie and Liz showing the way.
Mikey got her endorsement. Now is the time for him to endorse her ideas or prove forever where his allegiance lies. Unfortunately, I think I know the answer to this one…
"I think I know the answer to this one……." Yes indeed. The answer is within your personal echo chamber which is divorced from the real world.
As always, zappy is noun, verb, bennet!
The day after Obamacare was passed, Howard Dean said the biggest flaw in the legislation is that it did not address the problem of rising health care costs.
The chickens have come home to roost.
Have you forgotten the good ol' days when Medicare Part D ( a Bush program) was a disaster, yet the Democrats stepped to the plate and joined the Republican Congress to fix the problems?
Sure there was a problem, and a bi-partisan solution to that problem.
That wasn't a Republican being critical of Obamacare the day after it passed, that was Democrat Howard Dean, chair of the DNC from 2005 to 2009. He identified a critical flaw in the legislation and put policy above partisanship in his critique, much to his credit.
Any health care reform (be it Obamacare or whatever replaces it) must address the cost issue, and it must be done in a bi partisan effort.
BTW, Trump today came out and said (again) he wants Medicare to be able to negotiate with big pharma to lower drug prices. Nothing new, he's been saying this his entire campaign, taking on the drug companies and establishment Republicans.
Gee what a novel idea – competition instead of price fixing.
The Hill 1/26/16 Trump calls for Medicare to negotiate drug prices
And BTW, if you think I’m going to defend G.W. Bush or the Republican establishment, think again. I have no use for war criminal Bush or his crime family. I’m not a Republican, have never been a Republican, and God willing will never be a Republican.
There were Republicans who voted against Part D, too. See how that works? We've had, what, 63 proud votes in the House to repeal since? Even though the President made it clear on a regular basis that he understood there were problems and he'd work with them to address those changes? I recall that Obama, too wanted the right to negotiate drug prices but hit the wall in Congress. Akin to tort reform, this is the opportunity for the Republicans to put their money where their mouth is. Let's see how it plays out. BigPharma is one of the most aggressive lobbies on Capitol Hill and as a group their #1 recipient is the Senate Majority leader.
Good article in Salon, thanks. 15 years ago I actually worked on an Amgen lab in Boulder.
Clinton, Sanders, Obama are all for negotiated prices. So the fact it hasn't happened tells you how powerful big pharma is.
But there's plenty more in the swamp……
DaVita To Pay $350 Million To Resolve Allegations Of Illegal Kickbacks
Our very own DaVita with corporate headquarters downtown Denver, a company that was praised by Hickenlooper this January in his State of the State Address. $350 million is more than double the fine Wells Fargo paid when they got caught recently running their scam.
We all do, Zap. Even those who are happy with that answer.
And the voice of the shill is heard in the land: listen to that horney handed son of the soil, Donald Trump!
Keep on Keepin' on.
Considering at least 16,000,000 people voted for her in primaries, that elite group is awfully big.
For the record, I am not a "connected insider," any sort of "Wall Street money," haven't worked for corporate America in decades, am not affiliated with any union, and don't work for any media company (elitist, corporate, or otherwise).
And I proudly caucused for Clinton.
That's fine. And how many million dollar checks did you write out for her?
I gave Hilary $1 000. You voted for Trump.
I was part of the answer. You are part of the problem. So go to hell, Trump shill.
Apparently so did a lot of other people. Thanks for sharing.
Voting for Trump, then holding yourself up as someone that progressives should respect makes allencrybabie the Chris Christy of the left Now hurry on, you don't want to miss your kellyanne briefing, shillboy.
I don't disagree that the Democratic Party needs to fundamentally restructure. That's why I'm a bit confused by Bernie's support for Keith Ellison. The party needs a full-time chair who's ready to get to work reconstructing the party from the ground up. Ellison already has a job (or more). They need to stop treating the party chair as a prestige spot and start treating it like it's a place from which to run, and build, the party.
Also, as much as I might agree with Keith's politics, I don't think that (a) party folks are going to trust someone Bernie tries to place in charge, even if that notion is misguided, and (b) that the party wants to become what Bernie wants yet. Just like the party needs to become more inclusive in its message and show the white middle class that it's there for them, too, it needs to open up to progressives again without completely alienating center-left Democrats who support, or at least have sympathy with, the majority of things that progressives want. I didn't leave the party because they disagreed with me on some issues; I left because they no longer wanted to hear from folks like me that they were traveling down a road to self-destruction.
The absolute wrong message to take from this last election is that the country is ready for a socialist revolution or that identity politics works as long as we pick the right identities. The message that this election sent is that there are millions of folks out there who feel utterly excluded from this society and the promise it made to them. The solution to that is not to exclude millions of others, but to try to find a way to meet at least the needs they all have. I think that means higher taxes and real corporate income taxes. I think that means a new WPA, with funding in the "t" range and not the "b"range, and I think it means not targeting the thousands of folks who run Wall Street but, rather, the millions of folks who live on Main Street (some literally). I'm happy for someone to find another solution, though. 🙂
This is a populist era, and people who demonstrate the ability to serve the greater majority of folks will win out. Democrats, I think, are in the right place ideologically to do that while still protecting minorities from harm.
I'm supportive of Trump's plan to cut corporate income taxes, but only if there is a major overhaul of the tax code to get rid of most of the loopholes, and deductions that corporations take, to escape the current 35% corporate rate.
Ditto.
And along with that, the mortgage interest deduction, a subsidy to the real estate/housing industries which costs the Treasury over 100 billion a year. Studies have shown the MID benefits primarily higher income groups. A flat out repeal is probably not in order, but a modification in which its phased out as income rises.
The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) and the National Association of Realtors ( NAR ) are powerful special interest groups that scream bloody murder anytime there is talk of touching their sacred cow.
The good news is their money was on Clinton – Trump owes them nothing.
I am up for a revision in the tax code. Perhaps we can advocate taking away or severely restricting a "second home" deduction until we have enough government revenue to insure all people have a place to put their stuff?
There shouldn't be any "second home" deduction. If you want a second home (or a third or a forth or whatever), the taxpayers shouldn't have to subsidize it.
If you want a second home, pay for it yourself.
The same thing they owe him.
Sounds like a Mexican standoff to me.
Is Bernie a Democrat again?
Was he ever?
For your reading pleasure: "12 Notes from a Political Autopsy"
Key quote: “The people who got it right then should be heeded now.”
There is some validity in the article. Unfortunately, much of it is the typical "free stuff for everybody" leftist claptrap.
But I will add a plug; some will be offended; to be registered with one of the two major political parties if one wants to advocate for real change. Those who go unaffiliated are basically spineless IMHO and aren't willing to get into the trenches and work towards bringing about real change. Unaffiliateds to me just want to go with the tide's flow or whichever way the wind blows.
Benefit of the Doubt.
Benefits are Doubtful:
As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. – H. L. Mencken
A mandate? A city the size of Pueblo determined the outcome of the 2016 US election.
PS: Yes, Civics, I understand what happened.
With Steve Bannon dominating the news cycle, "Is the Alt Right racist?" is a question now churning on the Right and elsewhere. I'd like to provide a [somewhat] brief thought exercise to anyone interested in reading:
(This is shared from a Republican friends FB page)
Let us take the most recent Alt Right press conference held this September in the nation's capital. This event featured three main intellectual voices on the Alt Right: Richard Spencer of the National Policy Institute, Peter Brimelow of VDARE, and Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, the former of whom coined the phrase "alternative right" in the early 2010s. By most accounts, these three men are among the chief intellectual anchors of what we are now referring to as "alt right." Indeed, the title of the conference itself was “What Is The Alt Right?”, and its speakers attempted to answer that question. I am going to list a few quotes from these individuals below as a means of answering the question of whether or not the Alt Right is racist.
* Note* Please recognize that this is by no means exhaustive (I did it in roughly 15 min), nor is it the only way to judge whether or not the alt right is racist.For example, I am simply listing quotes because I think it is the foremost way of looking at the viewpoints of these intellectual heavyweights within the movement. Another sound methods of answering this question can be found in looking at the mastheads of these three magazines and reading the words of their comrades in thought. In a future post I will expand the confines in that regard. Additionally, while these three individuals and their publications are at the crest of Alt Right thought, they are by no means the only sources. Interested readers can peruse the works and/or publications of Kevin MacDonald, Milo Yiannopolous, Samuel Francis, Steve Sailer, Taki Theodracopolous, and others for more detail.
Richard Spencer:
“Our dream is a new society, an ethno-state that would be a gathering point for all Europeans. It would be a new society based on very different ideals than, say, the Declaration of Independence."
"Is the American nation just purely defined by the constitution and some legalisms? No. The American nation is defined by the fact that it is derived from Europe. That European people settled this continent, that European people built the political structures, that European people influenced its architecture, its economy, its art, its way of life and society and so on."
"What the ethnostate is, is an ideal. It's a thing, it's a way of thinking about we want a new type of society that would actually be a homeland for all white people. All European people. So that would include Slavs, that would include Germans, that would include Latins, it who would include people of all ethnicities that we would always have a safe space."
“Today, in the public imagination, ‘ethnic-cleansing’ has been associated with civil war and mass murder (understandably so)…But this need not be the case. 1919 is a real example of successful ethnic redistribution — done by fiat, we should remember, but done peacefully.”
Peter Brimelow:
"The mass immigration so thoughtlessly triggered in 1965 risks making America an alien nation — not merely in the sense that the numbers of aliens in the nation are rising to levels last seen in the 19th century; not merely in the sense that America will become a freak among the world's nations because of the unprecedented demographic mutation it is inflicting on itself;
“And you must admit that the 1965 Immigration Act, which hasresulted in a massive inflow almost entirely from non-traditional sources with the result that whites are projected to go into a minority after 2050, is something quite new in the American experience. Which inevitably raises the question: will it work?”
“Ideologically, most on the Alt Right share views that can be described as “identitarian,” “race realist,” “Dissident Right,” or (while I don’t like the term myself) “white nationalist.” These views are associated with some VDARE writers like John Derbyshire as well as American Renaissance, The Occidental Quarterly, and Spencer’s National Policy Institute.”
“The racial and cultural identity of America is legitimate and defensible: Diversity per se is not strength, but a vulnerability. It is a luxury that we can only afford as long as we preserve our breadwinner, the American people. VDARE recognizes that mass immigration both legal and illegal has driven America to the verge of bankruptcy in the following areas”
Jared Taylor:
“I care deeply about the future of Europeans wherever they have taken their culture. Which is to say I care about whites and Western civilization, and I believe our civilization can be carried forward only by the biological descendants of the people who created it.”
“the central element of the alt-right is the position it takes on race.”
“And therefore, to me, the whole purpose of being a racial dissident is to explain, as you just pointed out, all we want really is to be left alone. We want the right to establish our own society, our own communities, and let our destiny develop free from the unwanted embrace of others.”
“And when people start thinking in those terms, Well, wait a minute, are Muslims really of any use to the United States? Then the next step, of course, is to say, Well, are there any other groups that are of no use to the United States? What do, oh, Guatemalans, for example, bring to our country? What do Somalis bring to our country? What do Haitians bring to America? Do we really need 30,000,000 Mexicans living in this country? When you start thinking in terms of group differences, then the camel’s nose is under the tent. That opens the door to all kinds of anti-orthodox, subversive thinking.”
"In fact, blacks and Hispanics are, compared to whites, far more likely to be poor, illiterate, on welfare, or in jail; they are far more likely to have illegitimate children, be addicted to drugs, or have AIDS. By no definition of international competitiveness can the presence of these populations be anything but a disadvantage."
Richard Spencer: "European people settled this continent…….." Gee, I thought native Americans were here first. "European people influenced its architecture……" Guess he's never been to Mesa Verde, Canyon de Chelly, Chaco Canyon.
What an ass-wipe (Spencer).
The two sides clearly play by different rules of engagement (and history books). Here's a tale of two men: a black man condemning Republicans, and a white man playing the role of Inciter-in-Chief. I have my doubts the white man will suffer the same political fate this go-around.
The Van Jones Case Provides a Usable Template to Force Stephen Bannon Out
I don't think, Michael, Bannon will leave of his own accord. I think he is Trumps attempt to have it both ways. Knowing his alt-right troops will defect immediately if he sucks up to the monied "establishment" wing of the party (as the Priebus appt. tends to indicate), he is throwing them a bone here to keep them in line.
Trumps best interests are served by finding a way to lie to both sides of his party, and suck money and power from both. I don't think he will leave mid-term. Let us not forget his massive ego. He now intends to be the greatest president ever.
and, of course, Rudi Juliani as Secretary of State would help to cement that legacy.
Agreed, Duke. Bannon won't be pushed out by public opinion; Trump needs a symbol in the inner-circle for the Alt-right to ward off the pitchforks. Interesting piece this morning in the LA Times on Rudi and his vetting process. His consulting gigs with foreign governments and bad hombres in the Middle East are becoming problematic with the transition team. Not that 'Yosemite Sam' Bolton is much of a shining light, either….
Why Rudy Giuliani Shouldn't Be Secretary of State