Really is this what he’s worried about? Church Rocha was responsible for Bernie’s very successful Latino outreach, without which he wouldn’t have come as close as he did to winning. Tagaris was responsible for Bernie’s wildly successful fundraising. And to make Weaver the fall guy for Bernie’s losses is ridiculous. Who the hell does Figueredo think chose to place Weaver in such an influential position? Bernie signed off on all decisions Weaver made.

I definitely don’t agree with forming a SuperPac, but supporting Biden and trying to push him left does not make these people turncoats. The latest poll showed that 74% of Bernie supporters will be supporting Biden and another 8% are undecided. Bernie is supporting Biden. Jayapal is supporting Biden. AOC is voting for Biden. Are all these people turncoats too?

There are a lot more worthy targets for venom than Weaver, Rocha, and Tagaris. I really don’t see how this helps progressives. Fine you don’t want to vote for Biden. Fine that you want to point out Biden’s multitude of problems. (I like doing that too.) I would do cartwheels if the Tara Reade stuff torpedoed Biden’s candidacy. However, it’s not fine with me to attack the vast majority of Bernie supporters who will vote for Biden if he is the nominee. If Figueredo stayed with a critique about forming a SuperPac, I would have no problem with that, but he goes far beyond that.

Actually, a pretty good article in the Times so I included a bunch.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/29/us/politics/tara-reade-joe-biden.html

For more than three weeks, progressive activists and women’s rights advocates debated how to handle an allegation of sexual assault against Joseph R. Biden Jr. The conversations weren’t easy, nor were the politics: Mr. Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, faced one allegation; his opponent, President Trump, at least a dozen.

Finally, several of the women’s groups prepared a public letter that praised Mr. Biden’s work as an “outspoken champion for survivors of sexual violence” but also pushed him to address the allegation from Tara Reade, a former aide who worked in Mr. Biden’s Senate office in the early 1990s.

“Vice President Biden has the opportunity, right now, to model how to take serious allegations seriously,” the draft letter said. “The weight of our expectations matches the magnitude of the office he seeks.”

Then Mr. Biden’s team heard about the advocates’ effort. According to people involved in the discussions, the group put the letter on hold as it began pressuring Biden advisers to push the candidate to make a statement himself before the end of April, which is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Along with liberal organizers, they urged him to acknowledge the importance of survivors and the need for systemic change around issues of sexism and assault.

Nearly two weeks later, Mr. Biden and his campaign have yet to make that statement, and the advocates have not released their letter. The Biden campaign has said little publicly beyond saying that women deserve to be heard and insisting that the allegation is not true; privately, Biden advisers have circulated talking points urging supporters to deny that the incident occurred.

As two more women have come forward to corroborate part of Ms. Reade’s allegation, the Biden campaign is facing attacks from the right and increasing pressure from the left to address the issue. And liberal activists find themselves in a tense standoff with a candidate they want to support but who they say has made little attempt to show leadership on an issue that resonates deeply with their party’s base.

Top Biden aides are telling allies that they do not see the allegation resonating with voters in a measurable way, these people say. They’re confident that the allegation will not shake voters’ perceptions of Mr. Biden’s character as a devoted father and husband, with family ties forged through deep tragedies. They also believe that voters will view the allegation with great skepticism.

A Biden campaign spokesman declined to comment for this article on Wednesday. A Biden adviser said that the campaign was talking to activists and that Mr. Biden considered their views important.

The Biden campaign talking points, which were first reported by BuzzFeed News, instruct supporters to describe the candidate as a “fierce advocate for women” who has never faced any “complaint, allegation, hint or rumor of any impropriety or inappropriate conduct.” The talking points also inaccurately suggested that an investigation by The New York Times this month found that “this incident did not happen.”

In a statement issued Wednesday, The Times noted that the investigation “made no conclusion either way.”

One person who received a version of these talking points said it was pulled back by the campaign several hours later because the campaign was revising its strategy. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose the private communication.

Mr. Biden has yet to be asked about the allegation in an interview. In a joint appearance with Hillary Clinton that was livestreamed on his website on Tuesday, he discussed domestic violence, economic challenges facing women and the stresses of the coronavirus pandemic. No mention was made of Ms. Reade or her specific allegation.

Republicans and the Trump campaign are already using the accusation to undercut Mr. Biden and the Democratic Party as hypocritical on issues of gender equity. Some in the party’s liberal wing have seized on Ms. Reade’s account, saying she should be heard and using her allegation to argue that Mr. Biden is not the party’s strongest possible nominee — a tactic that Biden backers fear could hamper their ability to build Democratic enthusiasm around his bid.

“It can’t appear that she is being ignored,” said Nina Turner, a former national campaign co-chair for Senator Bernie Sanders, Mr. Biden’s last rival for the nomination. “If we want to keep our credibility as a party, then we will have to agree that this allegation and any allegation should be vetted in the public.”

Apart from the discussions with the campaign, some progressive activists have been debating how to respond to the allegation, a conversation that has intensified in recent days.

“Joe Biden himself needs to respond directly,” said Yvette Simpson, the chief executive of Democracy for America, a progressive advocacy organization, which plans to back the Democratic nominee. “While it is absolutely essential that we defeat Donald Trump in November, trying to manage the response through women surrogates and emailed talking points doesn’t cut it in 2020 — especially if Democrats want to continue to be the party that values, supports, elevates, hears and believes women.”

Tresa Undem, a pollster who specializes in surveys on gender issues, said that so far the allegation hasn’t dampened support for Mr. Biden among Democrats. But that could change quickly, she said, depending on how Mr. Biden and his campaign handle the evolving situation.
“If the election was held today, I don’t think he’d lose any support,” she said. “But this is a huge deal that’s not going away. The story is going to be on the hypocrisy, and that is the No. 1 thing voters loathe.”

Among Republicans, the years of allegations against Mr. Trump have inflicted little damage with his base. He has been accused of sexual assault and misconduct by more than a dozen women, who have described behavior that went far beyond the allegation against Mr. Biden.

He has repeatedly denigrated women over their appearance and intellect. The “Access Hollywood’’ tape, in which he boasted about grabbing women’s genitals, was released just weeks before his victory in the 2016 election.

In recent years, Democrats have sought to confront current and past misconduct in their own ranks and spoken bluntly about racial and gender inequalities.

Bernie is certainly not going to respond to Fox about this. No further comment. The one who needs to comment is Biden.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/sanders-keeps-quiet-on-biden-sexual-assault-allegation

Despite the growing uproar from many of his progressive supporters over the sexual assault allegation leveled against presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has remained quiet on the matter in recent days.

The only time Sanders mentioned the allegation against Biden was earlier this month during an interview with CBS, in which the Vermont lawmaker asserted that “any woman who feels that she was assaulted has every right in the world to stand up and make her claims.” But Sanders added that he did not know enough about the claims to comment further.

“I think that she has the right to make her claims and get a public hearing and the public will make their own conclusions about it,” Sanders said. “I just don’t know enough about it to comment further. All right.”

Sanders, who just days before that interview endorsed Biden’s White House bid upon dropping out of the race, has not publicly commented on the matter since. Fox News has reached out on multiple occasions to Sanders campaign officials and political aides, and has yet to receive a response.

Slight crack in the Dem wall here even though Biden is the “personification of hope and optimism for our country.” 🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/495419-pelosi-on-whether-biden-should-address-allegation-its-a-matter-that-he-has-to

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday that presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden “has to deal with” sexual assault allegations made by his former aide, Tara Reade.

The Speaker told CNN’s “New Day” that she has “great sympathy” for “any women” who come forward with an allegation.

She added that she does “support Joe Biden” and is “satisfied with how he has responded” to the allegations.

CNN anchor Alisyn Camerota the pressed Pelosi, saying Biden himself hasn’t acknowledged the claims, although the Biden campaign has denied them.

“It’s a matter that he has to deal with,” Pelosi responded. “But I am impressed with the people who worked for him at the time saying they absolutely never heard one iota of information about this.”

Pelosi said she is backing the former vice president in “one of the most important” presidential elections.

“He’s the personification of hope and optimism for our country, and I was proud to endorse him,” she said. “America needs a person like Joe Biden.”

The Speaker officially endorsed Biden for president Monday in a series of endorsements from top Democrats, including President Obama earlier this month.

Reade came forward more than a month ago with allegations she was sexually assaulted by Biden on Capitol Hill when he was a senator in 1993.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/30/tara-reade-biden-vice-president-224945

That means for many of the top veep prospects — all of whom are women — the job will entail squaring their earlier stances with the allegation against Biden. Since former Biden staffer Tara Reade accused Biden of assault last month, their reactions have been markedly different than during the Kavanaugh hearings: they’ve either stood with the former vice president or said nothing.

Few are in a more potentially awkward position than California Sen. Kamala Harris, who used the hearings as a springboard to her own presidential campaign and made clear she believed Ford’s accusations in 2018.

Harris later told reporters that after the Kavanaugh hearings, her “biggest fear is that there will be a group of people who retreat, right? That’s my biggest fear, that there will be people who will decide that if they speak out it doesn’t matter, and will feel deflated by what happened in a way that causes them to recede.”
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Earlier this month, however, Harris stuck with Biden.

“The Joe Biden I know is somebody who really has fought for women and empowerment of women and for women’s equality and rights,” Harris told the San Francisco Chronicle, though she made sure to say Reade “has a right to tell her story. And I believe that and I believe Joe Biden believes that, too.”

Harris’ defense of Biden has been joined in recent weeks by many of the top veep contenders — among them Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

Whitmer, a sexual assault survivor who tweeted in 2017 that “I’m saying #MeToo in hopes that future generations won’t have to” and a year later tweeted “I believe Dr. Ford”, avoided voicing clear support for Reade’s allegations.

“I think women should be able to tell their stories,” she told NPR earlier this month. “I think that it is important that these allegations are vetted, from the media to beyond. And I think that, you know, it is something that no one takes lightly. But it is also something that is, you know, personal. And so it’s hard to give you greater insight than that, not knowing more about the situation.”

Other prospects on Biden’s shortlist have chosen silence. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who similarly believed Ford, hasn’t spoken out about Reade. Nor has Florida Rep. Val Demings, who in 2018 wore black to Trump’s State of the Union speech to stand in solidarity with harassment and abuse victims. She, too, supported Ford.

“As a law enforcement officer, I saw how hard it is to come forward after a sexual assault. I am so proud of everyone who is sharing their stories today about #WhyIDidntReport. I believe you, and I stand with you,” Demings tweeted in September 2018.

So far, Biden has refused to comment personally on Reade’s allegations, declining media interviews or granting those where he was not asked about Reade’s accusations.
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He had a chance to personally address the issue Wednesday night during a Florida virtual fundraiser where an activist wanted him to comment on sexual assault in the military.

“Look, we have to change the culture of abuse in this country,” Biden said, sticking tightly to the issue of assault in the military. One donor on the Zoom meeting told POLITICO he thought Biden was going to talk about Reade because “I thought the question was put on the list with that in mind.”

Yeah Bernie was just Weaver’s puppet. How insulting to Bernie. Did Weaver hypnotize Bernie into hiring him and following his commands?

Unfortunately, the difference is all in the audio. Video/audio is everything here in the US. Trump had multiple allegations of sexual misconduct like Biden’s that Republicans ignored too. If audio surfaced of Biden saying exactly what Trump did, it would be quite a different story with the Dems. In fact, unlike Trump, I think Biden would be forced out, if merely for the fact a good portion of the Dem electorate care about that, while only a very small portion of Republican voters do.