Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., condemned the planned closure of Philadelphia-based Hahnemann University Hospital as an example of the failure of the U.S. healthcare system, Politico reports.
“The situation in Philadelphia illustrates the entire problem: In a city with one of the highest poverty rates in the country, a major hospital serving low-income communities is on the verge of laying off 2,500 people, abandoning 500 medical residents, and closing its operations thanks to an investment firm looking to make as much money as possible in a corporate fire sale,” Mr. Sanders said July 7, according to Politico.
Mr. Sanders voiced his support for the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals, which is advocating to keep the hospital open. The union represents 800 registered nurses at Hahnemann University Hospital. PASNAP endorsed Mr. Sanders in 2016
Important story from @mikeelk about the closing of Hahnemann Univ. Hospital in Philadelphia. Its private equity owner is bankrupting the 171 year-old medical center and selling the real estate for luxury condos
Private equity experts worry that private equity firms buying up hospitals simply to sell them for their real estate could become a trend.
“This is an industry where once somebody does this successfully, lots of other private equity firms will follow,” says Eileen Appelbaum. “You just have to think to yourself how many hospitals are in gentrifying neighborhoods in urban America, where the property is worth a lot more than the hospital itself.” Indeed, Freedman could carry this off himself: Paladin has Howard University Hospital in Washington, D.C.’s luxury condo–packed U Street neighborhood in its portfolio, along with four hospitals in south and east Los Angeles.
Union workers and community members say that’s why they intend to fight against the closing.
“It’s a community, despite the fact that there are lots of hospitals in the city of Philadelphia, the patients and workers who get served by one hospital are a community,” says Sue Bowes. “I am fighting really hard for this hospital not just for us but so that another hedge fund doesn’t come in and close down hospitals, and leave patients with nowhere to go. It’s just simply wrong.”
My question is, how the heck did a private equity vulture get his hands on a university hospital?
The month long WorldPride NYC, which marked the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, is coming to an end today with the biggest event, the Pride March.
The parade is the largest N.Y.C. Pride March, with an extended 2.5 mile route, double the number of marchers and dozens more floats than last year.
The Pride March starts at noon and runs down Fifth Avenue, beginning at 26th Street. It will make a turn at Eighth Street and then will head up Seventh Avenue past the Stonewall Inn, ending at 23rd Street.
This year, NYC is hosting the largest Pride celebration in the world. Check out the graphic below for the parade route and street closures. While there are no credible threats at this time, as always, we ask—if you see something, say something. #WorldPridepic.twitter.com/OQa6OJyWvw
NYC is also having a Reclaim Your Pride Day. It’s about going back to the grassroots of Pride, not capitalism of what it means to be LGBTQ +. Here’s a bit a history about Stonewall:
Hours before it was to become a flash point in the modern gay rights movement and a landmark visited with awe and reverence half a century later as if a shrine, it was just a dark, dingy bar called the Stonewall Inn, just another Friday night in June.
A mobster named Fat Tony with the Genovese crime family had bought the place two years earlier for a song — it had been a restaurant damaged in a fire — and reopened it as a gay bar. The mob owned most of the city’s gay bars, running them as private clubs because they could not obtain liquor licenses. The bars were cash machines.
Fat Tony slapped black paint on the walls and windows and posted a man at the front door. A concrete wishing well, inherited from the restaurant, remained inside the front door. The new owner often boasted that he recouped his modest investment in the first few hours of opening night in March 1967.
There were two bars and rooms for dancing to the jukebox. Bartenders made drinks with cheap liquor served out of bottles bearing brand-name labels. Dirty glasses were dunked in dirty sinks. The drinking age was 18, and broke kids who couldn’t afford a drink held empty beer cans all night to fool the waiter.
“It was a bar for the people who were too young, too poor or just too much to get in anywhere else,” one patron would recall later in “Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution,” by David Carter (St. Martin’s Press, 2004), one of several books, including two new arrivals, “The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History,” by Marc Stein (New York University Press, 2019), and “The Stonewall Reader,” edited by the New York Public Library (Penguin Books, 2019), that served as sources for this account.
No one inside on the night of June 27, 1969, knew that just outside the door, as Friday night rolled over into Saturday morning, trouble was arriving across the street in the triangular wedge of Christopher Park. A police team quietly waited for the go-ahead command to raid the Stonewall. The officer in charge was Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine, a World War II veteran who had fought in foxholes in Europe before he was injured by a land mine.
Inspector Pine knew the Stonewall; he had raided it just four days earlier, arresting employees and seizing liquor that Tuesday night. But as he was leaving, someone said with disdain, “We’ll be open again tomorrow.”
The ostensible reason for the raid was a crackdown on unlicensed bars selling liquor illegally. But gay New Yorkers were feeling increasing pressure and harassment in Greenwich Village and beyond, and the violent eruption at the Stonewall was a result of this mounting tension. Within days of the Stonewall uprising, the police had raided five gay bars in the Village, Mr. Carter wrote, shutting three of them — the Checkerboard, the Tel-Star and the Sewer — down for good.
“How many times can one turn the other cheek?” a then 26-year-old musician in the Stonewall that night later asked.
snip
The music stopped, and the bright lights blinked on. “I thought, ‘Here we go again,’” recalled a 26-year-old patron, Philip Eagles, who was sipping a drink when the officers arrived.
But immediately, this raid felt different, foremost in its timing. Usually, officers arrived early in the evening, before the bars got busy. After midnight was a different story.
“Stonewall was filled that night with the usual clientele,” wrote Mark Segal, then 18 and newly arrived from Philadelphia. “Drag queens, hustlers, older men who liked younger guys, and stragglers like me — the boy next door who didn’t know what he was searching for and felt he had little to offer.”
The police corralled the employees in one area and shooed most of the clientele outside into the warm night. In past raids, those men and women hurried home, relieved they’d been spared arrest and the prospect of seeing their names in the papers.
But not on this night. The Stonewall’s patrons gathered across the street in the little park. Emboldened by the late hour and their sheer number, many customers were more belligerent than usual in a raid, “giving the cops lip,” Mr. Eagles recalled.
Inspector Pine recalled decades later, “We had a couple of the transvestites who gave us a lot of flak.” It was standard procedure in these raids that cross-dressing patrons be questioned about their clothing — they had to be wearing at least three articles considered to be gender appropriate — or, worse, subjected to anatomical inspections. But nonetheless, “There was no plan to take these people.”
The crowd outside grew as the bar continued to empty out, with loud cheers for the new arrivals. The mood started out as jovial before it shifted. “The crowd began taunting the police,” Mr. Segal wrote. “The cops started to get rough, pushing and shoving.”
A woman resisted the police and was handcuffed and, despite her struggles, manhandled into the back of a police car. She managed to get out, and the officers pushed her in again. This ratcheted up the response from the crowd, and people began throwing things — pocket change clanged off the car and struck officers.
Among those throwing change was Sylvia Rivera, whose rise as a transgender activist would take hold in the hours and days to come. “I just happened to be there when it all jumped off,” Ms. Rivera recalled later. “I said, ‘Well, great, now it’s my time.’”
A reporter for the Village Voice, Howard Smith, saw the commotion from a window nearby, and he grabbed a notebook and rushed over. By chance, he fell in beside Inspector Pine. A police wagon arrived to transport the people who had been arrested and the dozens of bottles of seized liquor.
“The crowd had grown to ten times its size,” Inspector Pine said later. “It was really frightening.”
Somebody threw a beer can at the wagon. Bottles followed. “Everyone’s restless, angry and high-spirited,” the author Edmund White, who happened upon the scene, recalled later. “No one has a slogan, no one has an attitude, but something’s brewing.”
Stonewall was the watershed event that galvanized the gay community to organize for their rights.
Four years ago, the SCOTUS ruled in favor of James Obergefell and others, requiring all states to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples and to recognize same-sex marriages validly performed in other jurisdictions.[5] This established same-sex marriage throughout the United States and its territories. In a majority opinion authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Court examined the nature of fundamental rights guaranteed to all by the Constitution, the harm done to individuals by delaying the implementation of such rights while the democratic process plays out,[6] and the evolving understanding of discrimination and inequality. (borrowed from Wikipedia)
As noted yesterday, Bernie Sanders marched in several Pride parades in NH.
Related to equality, Donald Trump Jr tweeted that Kamala Harris was not black enough, being of Indian-Jamaican heritage.
Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, shared another person’s tweet during the Democratic debate this week that falsely claimed Senator Kamala Harris was not black enough to be discussing the plight of black Americans. He later deleted it. https://t.co/HieF4NNu5I
Donald Trump Jr. was bashed on Twitter Saturday for boosting a type of “birtherism” campaign against Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) that surged in the wake of her breakout performance in one of the recent debates among Democratic presidential candidtates.
A right-wing operative attacked Harris on Twitter after the debate, claiming she had no right to represent American blacks because her father grew up in Jamaica. Harris, who is of Indian and Jamaican heritage, was born in Oakland, California, in 1964.
The attack went viral thanks in part to Donald Jr.’s retweet and an assist from Twitter accounts identified as bots. The onslaught echoed the “birther” campaign against Barack Obama that falsely claiming he was born in Africa and couldn’t legally be president. Donald Trump (with wife Melania ) was a leading voice among a group of conspiracy theorists that promulgated the Obama birther lie.
Dem candidates Elizabeth Warren, Corey Booker and Bernie Sanders were the first to push back against the Trump family.
The attacks against @KamalaHarris are racist and ugly. We all have an obligation to speak out and say so. And it’s within the power and obligation of tech companies to stop these vile lies dead in their tracks.
One night after many pundits said he acquitted himself well in the debate in Miami between himself and other 2020 Democratic Presidential hopefuls, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders arrived in Cincinnati to deliver the keynote address at the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA) Legacy Awards Dinner.
Sanders addressed a large local and national media contingent, which also included many members of the Ohio press.
Earlier this month, Sanders was the lone candidate to accept an invitation to speak at the gala, which is part of the NNPA’s weeklong national convention.
The NNPA is a trade organization that represents the more than 200 African American-owned newspapers and media companies throughout the country.
The organization does not endorse candidates, leaving such decisions up to its member publishers whose influence and readership comprise the nation’s largest media markets, including New York, Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Tennessee, San Francisco, and numerous swing states around the country.
After being introduced by former Ohio State Sen. Nina Turner, Sanders gave an inspired 25-minute address in which he blasted President Donald Trump as a racist and a bigot and he promised that, if elected, he will work to make college tuition-free, eliminate student debt, take climate change seriously, and make every effort to level the playing field economically, educationally and in other ways that reflect his stance on social justice for African Americans and other individuals of color.
“It is absolutely imperative to defeat the most dangerous president in the history of this country,” Sanders said.
“He is a racist and a bigot,” the senator said.
Sanders said he and his wife thought long and hard before he decided to enter the race this year. Even after deciding to run, Sanders said he slept on it and almost reconsidered, but he believed it was important that he step up for the sake of all Americans, particularly the underserved.
“We are going to have to transform this nation and create an economy that works for all of us, not just the one percent,” Sanders said.
“People aren’t able to go to the doctor because they can’t afford to and if you go to a hospital, you’re afraid to get hit with a $50,000 medical bill,” he said, before promising that a Sanders Administration would work to provide medical coverage for all.
“My anger at [Trump] is not just that he wanted to take away health care for 32 million people, but his [proposed] massive cuts to Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security and his tax cuts which …. were for the top one percent,” Sanders said.
The senator drew applause several times from the packed crowd inside the second-floor ballroom of the Westin.
He also blasted Trump for the president’s disbelief in climate change.
“It is the great existential threat of our time and this is not an issue that we have a choice about,” Sanders said.
Sanders also promised to focus his presidency on social, environmental, racial and economic justice.
“We have a president who deliberately is trying to divide America and not only do we have to defeat the worst president in the history of our country, we will have to transform this nation and create an economy for all of us and not just the one percent,” he said.
More Tweets, news, and videos in the comments section. This also serves as a continued open thread. What’s on your mind this weekend?
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison endorsed Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ DemocratiIn c primary bid in the 2020 election on Friday, arguing that Sanders has the principles and record needed to take on the country’s growing economic and social disparities.
“The most pressing problem of our time is inequality,” Ellison told HuffPost in an interview. “For working-class people, they really can’t thrive and grow in this economy. And Bernie has the best prescriptions now and over the course of time has demonstrated the most consistent commitment to working families.”
Ellison, a former co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee, attended the first Democratic presidential primary debates in Miami this week.
Sanders’ influence was evident even on the first night when he was not present, Ellison argued, noting that every candidate had to respond to ideas like single-payer health care and tuition-free public college that Sanders brought into the mainstream with his 2016 presidential run.
“The wealthy in our society are accumulating more and more wealth which they use to influence government and corrupt democracy,” Ellison said. ”We need somebody with the spine to confront it.”
Ellison’s endorsement of Sanders is not surprising. He is a longstanding political and ideological ally of Sanders, becoming the lead co-sponsor of single-payer health care legislation ― commonly known as Medicare for All ― in the House prior to his departure in 2018. The then-Minnesota congressman was one of the first and only members of Congress to endorse Sanders in the 2016 election cycle. Sanders backed Ellison’s unsuccessful run for DNC chair in 2017, as well as his successful bid for Minnesota’s top law enforcement post in November.
Ellison nonetheless adds an influential left-wing voice to Sanders’ team as competition escalates between Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts for the support of progressive primary voters.Fro
Ellison said he had great respect for Warren, who he called “a wonderful candidate.”
In other news, it appears that Harris may have already walked back her view on government funded insurance for everyone.
Presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) on Friday clarified her stance on health insurance, saying she doesn’t support eliminating private insurers after appearing to back just that during the Democratic primary debate on Thursday.
Asked in an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Friday if she believed private insurance should be eliminated in the U.S., she clarified: “No, no. I do not.”
Harris raised her hand Thursday night when the panel was asked by moderator Lester Holt who supported eliminating private insurance in favor of a government-run health care plan.
Here’s the segment in its entirety on Morning Joe. I have thoughts as to what her words may portend. However, let’s discuss and see what you think! I’ll also be adding some other things noticed by other progressives regarding Harris.
Today is the day. I'll be on the debate stage in Miami tonight to continue our fight to create a nation that works for all of us. Watch live at 9 pm ET at https://t.co/4qQZuRS3oD. pic.twitter.com/CSSfqbJQwA
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has started highlighting his policy differences with former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. He’ll get a big chance in the second night of the Democratic primary debates on Thursday. To the extent that the two end up hogging the spotlight, it could draw airtime from Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., and Senator Kamala Harris of California, the other two candidates receiving strong support in polls. Here are the political dynamics to watch.
The Main Event
Well, duh. The two heavyweights. The only two who have previously run for president. Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders represent the ideological poles of the primary field. This is the marquee matchup of the two-night debates. And both have plenty of tape to review. Mr. Sanders can watch how Mr. Biden navigated the multi-candidate 2008 debates. And Mr. Biden can study how Mr. Sanders attacked an establishment front-runner in his primary debates with Hillary Clinton.
The Next Generation
Flanking Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders will be two fresh faces of the Democratic Party’s future, each making the case that the future is now. Mr. Buttigieg has displayed an uncanny calm in national television appearances, and it can be easy to forget that the debate will be his introduction to millions of viewers. Ms. Harris’s best national moments have been at Senate committee hearings, where the former prosecutor interrogated hostile Trump administration witnesses. But she was in control of those settings. Debates are far less predictable.
Sanders is proposing the federal government pay to wipe clean the student debt held by 45 million Americans — including all private and graduate school debt — as part of a package that also would make public universities, community colleges and trade schools tuition-free. Sanders is proposing to pay for these plans with a tax on Wall Street his campaign says will raise more than $2 trillion over 10 years, though some tax experts give lower revenue estimates. Sanders will be joined Monday by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who will introduce legislation in the House to eliminate all student debt …Continue reading →
Political campaigns are like blockbuster films – massive undertakings with many moving parts, whose successes are difficult to replicate. It’s never easy for a sequel to live up to the original. While the cast of characters may be the same, things that were once fresh may, after time, seem recycled and tired.
And while the backbone of Sanders’ rhetoric is the same, there are some new twists and flourishes. There’s a heavier emphasis on criminal justice reform and swipes at the “prison-industrial complex.” More talk of his own personal story, including his childhood of living “paycheque to paycheque”. His wife, Jane Sanders, has joined the list of campaign surrogates, offering a more personal look at the candidate.
It’s all part of the Sanders campaign’s attempt to expand on the successes and avoid the mistakes of 2016.
There are a number of ways this iteration of the Bernie political crusade is clearly better positioned for victory. In 2016, it was frequently a slapdash, shoestring operation ill-prepared for the scope of the national contest.
“When we began the campaign back in May of 2015, there was no way to know how quickly the campaign was going to grow and how much grass-roots support there would be,” says Jeff Weaver, who ran the Sanders campaign in 2016 and is now a senior adviser to Sanders. “So the campaign really could not keep up.”
This time around, he says, Sanders has a much more sophisticated nationwide electoral infrastructure. The Vermont senator’s Our Revolution organisation – picking up where his 2016 effort left off and developed over three years – effectively served as a turnkey national campaign, just waiting for the green light.
Sanders boasts a volunteer list of over a million people, and can turn on the money faucet from his grass-roots donor network with seeming ease. In the first quarter of 2019 fundraising, he pulled in $18.2m – easily outpacing the rest of the Democratic field (which excluded Biden at that stage).
Bernie energizes the crowd at Rep Jim Clyburn’s Fish Fry last evening:
https://youtu.be/AhxeWphPu-A
More news, tweets, and videos in the comments section. See you there birdies!
Did anyone watch the POTUS’s speech? I had to walk Ruby and listen to Bruce Springsteen’s new album, “Western Stars”. Hard work but someone’s gotta do it!
— Political Party LIVE! (@PPLiveIowa) June 4, 2019
C-SPAN says it is broadcasting the event at 7:00 PM CT. JD Scholten will also be at the event before Bernie. Prefer to watch it early in the AM? It will be rebroadcasted at 4:56 CT tomorrow!
More news, tweets, videos in the comments section. What’s on your mind?
DENMARK – Sen. Bernie Sanders will be making a donation to Denmark residents following his recent trip to the town.
Sanders’ campaign stated that the Democratic presidential candidate’s visit with Denmark citizens prompted him to make a donation of water at a rally scheduled to address the city’s issues
“Following Sen. Bernie Sanders’ visit to Bamberg County, where he met with those impacted by the ongoing Demark water crisis, Bernie 2020 South Carolina State Director Kwadjo Campbell will join with residents and community leaders in Denmark at the Rally for Safe Clean Water,” a campaign press release says.
The rally, which is free and open to the public, will be held at 199 Coker Ave. at 7 p.m. Saturday, May 25.
“In addition to echoing Sen. Sanders’ call for immediate action to resolve the crisis and ensure that all Americans have safe, clean drinking water, Campbell will deliver 500 cases of bottled water, donated by Sen. Sanders and the campaign, to help ease the burden of families in Denmark facing the constant threat of toxic water,” the release said.
During his campaign stop, Sanders visited the home of Denmark residents Pauline Brown and her husband.
Sanders stated that water safety is an issue all over the country.
WJBF-TV recently reported that the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control surveyed the town’s water system in April and gave it an “unsatisfactory” rating. Its water quality was rated “satisfactory.”
Bernie Sanders still has my full support. I don't know of any other candidate that is so deeply for regular folks and poor folks. Anyone else gone to Denmark, SC to learn about their water crisis which rivals Flint's? Anyone else even KNOW about Denmark SC's water crisis?
Well, I never expected our ‘(away from) home movies’ to be the subject of a @MotherJones article. But it does illustrate 2 things – 1) the focus was on peace & friendship & 2) Bernie has a sense of curiosity & humor! Still ❤️ my guy! https://t.co/9yj1huYJr1
— Jane O'Meara Sanders (@janeosanders) May 21, 2019
This video came to mind immediately:
Tonight is Beto’s TH on CNN. Anyone watching?
More news, articles, and tweets in the comments. Please join us there!
Bernie Sanders is holding a townhall at the Mt. Zion AME Church in Montgomery at 12:45 pm. After visiting Lowndes County, one of the poorest counties in America, Bernie Sanders is holding a town hall in Montgomery to discuss how we can come together in the fight for economic, racial, environmental and social justice.
RT ryanobles: While touring the National Peace & Justice Center- a memorial to lynching victims in Montgomery- Sen. BernieSanders stops to snap a photo with his personal phone of a message on the wall. His National campaign co-chair ninaturner lo… pic.twitter.com/DX6X6aeR6P
— 🌹 #BernieSanders for President 2020🌹 (@WeLoveBernie20) May 20, 2019
We’ll be blogging here. See you in the comments!
Update: Bernie’s team is late with the stream. Go here: https://www.cbs42.com/watch/live
Yesterday I had the bad misfortune of going over to TOP to watch the purity trolls. I’ll explain what I mean by that in a moment.
As reported at the Wing, Bernie Sanders eeked out a win on the Straw Poll. Not that the Straw Poll means a lot, but it does give some idea of where the energy is as far as the Democratic bloggers are in organizing for their candidates in the 2020 cycle. Unfortunately, Beat the Press thinks TOP is a progressive blog, but they don’t know because they live in the Beltway and Markos in tight with the DCCC consultants because well, they are one of many consultants for the Dem Party in general.
Markos, in the space of 3 days, penned four diaries to say about the recent poll at TOP and other polls. As you may recall, Kos has his own polling services, called Civiqs. I don’t know which candidates are using his service, but based on these headlines, I’m guessing it’s not Bernie Sanders.
It was our highest-vote total poll yet, with 59,999 votes tallied. After trailing Elizabeth Warren most of the day, a late surge from supporters pushed Bernie over the top, barely. But those trendlines don’t bode well for him.
Let’s see what Kos means.
Oh, so Warren did a lot better and Bernie’s lot shrunk. But the problem is that Kos completely discounted this date when recalling the time-series:
That was when the most votes casted. But of course, Kos was too embarrassed to admit to Chuck Todd on MSNBC that Bernie still has a lot of support.
Each time Bernie wins now, it’s because Berners “freeped” the poll. The good denizens at TOP are just as dismissive as the blog owner because they haven’t quite figured out that purge in 2016 made a lot of folks (hence TPW, C99, r/Kossacks for Sanders, r/WoTB, etc) go and form their own communities. And they aren’t too welcoming in having the progressives disrupt their group think.
All of that was pretty small potatoes for “an analysis”. Within the next 24 hours, 3 more diaries were penned by GOS, using a poison font keyboard. I’m only going to mention 2 of the most odious ones. If Bernie loses support among youth, what’s left?
Kos digs in and uses polling data from the Morning Consult, comparing March to April polling.
However, what happens if he can’t hold that core? This isn’t 2016, with a binary choice between Bernie and a demonized establishment Democrat. This is a rich field, with credible candidates representing just about every key party constituency. There are candidates just as liberal as Bernie, yet not as polarizing. So would Bernie’s core supporters stick with him as they became better aware of this amazing field? Apparently not, according to the latest Morning Consult primary poll.
“Sanders on the decline with 18-29 year-olds,” reads the polling memo. ”Throughout March, Bernie Sanders had 45% of the first choice vote share among America’s youngest voters. That support has steadily declined and currently sits at 33%.”
Overall, the poll pegs the race at Joe Biden 39, Sanders 19, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris at 8, Pete Buttigieg at 6, and Beto O’Rourke at 5.
snip
He can’t grow, and if he can’t hold his most important supporters? His path to the nomination, already near-zero, becomes effectively zero.
What’s funny is that Sanders isn’t even losing his supporters to some of the new, dynamic, exciting Democrats. Rather, they’re mostly going to Joe Biden. That feels a little sad. (My conjecture? Biden is a low-information-voter proxy for Barack Obama, and who doesn’t miss Obama?)
Now the question begs, what’s left if the millennials finally wake up and realize Bernie (as well as Biden) is an old man? They’ll leave him, of course.
Will Biden hold that youth vote? I’m on that limb that says “no way,” but who knows. What is clear at this point is that if Sanders can’t even stop a significant portion of his youth support from defecting to Biden, what happens when more of them become aware of other alternatives?
Kos doubles down to a new low in his next diary, which is within a couple of hours of the above one, but hey, he’s on a roll to smear Bernie and give you some alternatives better than Bernie and why.
Moreover, Mayor Pete, Castro (not named) and Klobuchar are desperate to garner eyeballs and would also go to a Klan rally.
The Sanders appearance has its own internal logic: He likes to thumb his nose at Democrats, including those fighting the war against Fox News. And he delighted his supporters by doing battle with Fox News hosts. It wasn’t helpful to the broader movement, and reinforced the fact that he’ll never be a team player, but it definitely gave him a nice promotional boost at the time. Ratings were legit great. I’ll call it a smart move. An asshole move, for sure! But smart.
But the rest of these Democrats? Going on Fox is a desperate cry for attention, from a crew so desperate for relevance that they would apparently attend a Klan rally if it gave them a shred of a spotlight.
If GOS wasn’t bad enough with his offensive missives, the Berners got slammed when defending their candidate. Some of the comments were vile. Here’s an ice cream scoop for you, mixed with manure:
Kossack Centrist: Well, are white men threatened under Trump? Nope. He’s creating a white patriarchal utopia.
White men can see going on Fox as a political move, instead of the legitimatization of the state sanctioned terrorism against marginalized people that it is.
Any candidate, that wants to appeal to Fox News viewers, doesn’t care enough about my safety for me to consider voting for them.
Berner: Jews have been persecuted for centuries. Sanders was brave to face the enemy instead of cowering.
Kossack Centrist: Yeah, Bernie sure is under direct physical threat due to his appearance on Fox (sarcasm).
Give me a fucking break.
Rolling my eyes forever, over the new forced narrative, that somehow, an old white man from Vermont, experiences the same threats to his personhood as women, black men, black women, Muslims, Latinx, the LGBTQA community, and practicing Jews (an no, Sanders isn’t one of those).
Right now in this country, women are losing their right to bodily autonomy. Black men are murdered at will by agents of the state. Latino children are living in cages. Trans Americans are being erased from society. People are being shot in their houses of worship.
Don’t you dare try and claim, that the old white man from the whitest white state in the nation is somehow in the same amount of danger as those marginalized groups.
The martyrdom syndrome and cosplaying victimhood of Sanders supporters is sickening.
My comment:
Markos is already getting critical comments on twitter about this diary, and perhaps that is what he wants. If I were Harris and Warren, I would be disgusted by the commentary. They made their points implicitly that they differ from Bernie Sanders and others on FC appearances. But they didn’t pay someone to batter the candidates and throw insults at their supporters.
A lot of hypocrisy. Calling Bernie Sanders’ FC appearance an asshole move is not too different from the comments one makes on The Blaze. Red meat to stir up the place.
Holocaust deniers maybe? Purity indeed. That what was said about Bernie Sanders. But nope, they are purifying for a slightly center left political lot. Which is bad. Most of the American people are not where Biden or even Harris is today. They support MfA, GND, 15% cap on credit card interest, and that excessive capitalism isn’t working too well for them.
The hypocrisy is amazing. It’s a blog for Identitarians, yet, it’s OK to use borderline anti-semitic comments to smear Bernie Sanders, a Jewish candidate whose paternal family was killed by the Nazis in WWII, and grew up in a neighborhood in which people wore identification numbers on their arms.
.@BernieSanders address to the Islamic Center of Southern California is unusually personal.
He reflects on growing up Jewish & crying while reading about the Holocaust.
In the wake of the New Zealand 🇳🇿 shooting, he says it’s abhorrent we haven’t learned more from history. pic.twitter.com/HvC6JmhjN1
1: Publish caustic conjecture on the front page about one of the leading contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination
Once they’re at the convention with his 30 percent, they presumably figure they can threaten and bully the party to nominate him. This way, he doesn’t have to work to expand support beyond his core group of supporters.
#2: Instead of following Elizabeth Warren’s model and simply presenting a reasonable case for not participating in Fox News townhalls, publish a front page article casting Democratic candidates who have a difference of opinion on this subject as being either an “asshole” or…
so desperate for relevance that they would apparently attend a Klan rally if it gave them a shred of a spotlight
#3: In that same front page article, state — without any sense of the irony of your statement — that a leading contender for the Democratic nomination (the one pictured above pitching in to save the ACA) “will never be a team player.”
No doubt there are additional examples of how Daily Kos can gin up infighting among Democrats, but I’ll stop at those two articles, which were published on the same day (May 15, 2019) on the front page, by the same author.
Of course, it goes without saying that this author has every right to publish whatever he wants here, since he’s the founder of the blog. He is of course not subject to warnings or “time outs” or whatever slaps on the wrist might apply to regular users.
I hope you will go recommend that diary.
Kos is looking into the mirror of desperation in my view. Why does he continue a circular firing squad on Democrats, yet his moderators have told Berners to quit criticizing other Dems and just support our candidate? Like the tv corporate media, DK Alexa ranking has sunk like a stone.
What I don’t know is if Elizabeth Warren’s and Kamala Harris’ campaign are feeling the bern (and Biden) because these circular attacks seemed planned, especially if Bernie had lost the straw poll and Kos didn’t get his contributing spot on MTP as a result. I hope it’s not a conspiracy.
I’m reminded of a song from the early 70’s by the 5 Man Electrical Band in which a hippy constantly has to deal with the Establishment (the Man). TOP continues to hippy punch Bernie Sanders because his democratic socialist practices are “not team” player methods. Bernie wants to create mass politics, something Kos was successful when George Bush put us into a war through lies. But now, Daily Kos, is well, withering away, just like Hillary Clinton. And Bernie threatens his neoliberal politics. If Bernie wins it all, Kos’s blog likely won’t survive.
The United States Congress must do everything it can to prevent the Trump Administration’s attempts to put us on the brink of a catastrophic and unconstitutional war with Iran. https://t.co/n2Wbzcj2Pq
It takes about a min or so before Bernie appears. You may wish to move the bar a little so that you don’t have to wait.
Bernie Sanders was one of the original co-sponsors of Tom Udall’s S1309 bill, Prevention of Unconstitutional War with Iran Act of 2019. I don’t know why Elizabeth Warren waited until today to sign on, but we should get this bill out of the committee. It’s stuck there.
More tweets, news, and videos in the comments. Consider this an open thread.
li
