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Rodrigo castellanos
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Posted: 20 February 2020 at 8:35pm | IP Logged | 1 post reply

I think Sanders made a great point last night about how
it is the rich that live in a socialist society.

Amen. The biggest lie that the conservatives have instilled in people's minds is that the social classes that live off government assistance are the lower income ones.

"The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's
money." - Margaret Thatcher

Right-wing career politicians love saying stuff like that. Even if they haven't held a job in the private sector once (sometimes even entire "political" families, across several generations).

Talk about "other people's money".

 


Edited by Rodrigo castellanos on 20 February 2020 at 8:38pm
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John Byrne
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Posted: 20 February 2020 at 8:39pm | IP Logged | 2 post reply

Having said that, and obviously looking from afar, Sanders is the only candidate that has a shot of beating Trump in the general election.

•••

Trump just has to keep saying “socialist” and he’ll get the same voters—and the same Electors—he got last time.

Can Sanders win the red states? I don’t think so.

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Rodrigo castellanos
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Posted: 20 February 2020 at 8:45pm | IP Logged | 3 post reply

Trump just has to keep saying “socialist” and he’ll get the same voters—and the same Electors—he got last time.

Can Sanders win the red states? I don’t think so.


I partially agree, JB.

Trump is the clear favorite in this election, he´ll probably win. 

But then the question becomes, which of the Democratic candidates can put more of a fight? Or win the red states. Or motivate the working classes to vote. Or handle a debate.

Buttigieg? Warren? 

Really?



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Rebecca Jansen
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Posted: 20 February 2020 at 8:49pm | IP Logged | 4 post reply

If Bernie gets in he won't be able to keep his promises for many reasons, and trying to keep even a few will be at great expense to a lot of working class people and ignoring some very pressing jobs that will need to be focused on (Obama should've focused on reimposing regulations that were thrown out which led to the crisis of 2008 instead of 'his' health-care legacy so much, which still could all disappear under a more empowered Trump and Republican party), not just at the expense of some mostly imagined evil billionaires. A little Bernie is great, a lot is going to be a huge pendulum swing or at least the attempt at it when whoever does eventually follow Trump will have a full-time job just cleaning up and restoring... which means he should stay a senator because I don't think he even wants to be the clean-up fix-it guy needed, he wants to be grand visionary with true believers. Warren would be even more dysfunctional I think, and she seems to promise even more of a pendulum swing. I'm really sad to say it genuinely could be four more Trump years which is just absolutely boggling. This primary system with endless debates and town halls is a system that is coming up with some total jokers... Bush Jr. over McCain, Trump and Ted Cruz were at the top in 2015-16... it just seems to leave the biggest fanatic base character at the end and destroy all the most qualified candidates somehow for not being great performers (or characters).

What Bernie's campaign was saying about Bloomberg having sexually assaulted numerous women, even if corrected and then corrected again, that should disqualify him right there if he didn't fire that person immediately. Ridiculous on a Trumpian level. Oh, and he is not a member of the party. In the Canadian system that would be impossible; no Trumps or Sanders can drop in from outside like that. Crazy that they can just because since Ross Perot everyone is scared of a third party character with a fanatical base splitting votes, so now here you are in Trump land looking toward extravagant Bernieland?

Hey, they both want to take my Canadian prescription meds to buy your votes so to me they are both jerks. Canadina health care is grossly misrepresented in the U.S., and I know that just from people coming up to me when I've been in the U.S. needing to be corrected on all they are telling me about our system from some half-truth stacked Michael Moore film. Rush Limbaugh is all about half-truths, are you going to take info from Moore (and Bernie) just because their hearts are supposedly in the right place? Why not try to support the straight talkers who don't promise all the pie-in-the-sky nobody ever gets? The ones with the best records and qualifications and to hell with personality or so-called charm! Trump is supposed to have been loaded with charm... enjoy! :^P

'Give Bernie a shot' is exactly like 'give Trump a chance' I was hearing when he was running and then even once he was in and making a mess and lying from day one. What have you got to loose? Well more of what you're loosing right now: functionality, sober moderate honest people replaced by fanatics, losing people who have spent a career working their way up instead of dropped into a top spot from outside.

Edited by Rebecca Jansen on 20 February 2020 at 8:53pm
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David Allen Perrin
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Posted: 21 February 2020 at 3:19am | IP Logged | 5 post reply

Sanders doesn’t need to win the ‘red states’.

Bernie needs to win the same states he beat Hillary in 2016, namely Michigan, Wisconsin, West Virginia.  

People seem to think Trump won by some overwhelming number of people pouring out into the voting booths for him.  No.  He won by a sliver of people in just the few exact states that Hillary needed...but neglected to make herself known.  Here in Michigan I saw Bernie campaigning at least 4 times.  Hillary never once.  She WAS in Michigan...at a private fundraiser in VERY wealthy St. Claire Shores just outside of Detroit.

Trump scored the greatest inside straight in political history.  And he beat the only candidate whose ‘unlikeable’ numbers were near his.  

Bernie Sanders is NOT Hillary Clinton.  

He’s no communist.
He’s not some boogeyman.
He isn’t here to take your precious money.

The dude wants to make sure people who want to go to a public university can do so.   He wants to make sure every citizen has healthcare.  EVERY citizen.  He wants to take big donor money out of politics.  He wants to decriminalize marijuana.  

This is a matter of voting for not only yourself, but people you’ll never know or meet.  You got a problem with the kind of violent crime the news uses to keep you up at night?  Sanders policies would go a long way to easing that fear.  Not overnight, but over time.  You got family who are struggling with medical debt?  Bernies policies would ease that burden.

The problem I’ve always had with ‘centrist’ politics is that it serves no one but the politician.  Meaning every policy is designed to not offend or push the boundary or challenge the thinking.  And frankly no positive, meaningful changes in this country’s history have come from being ‘moderate’.

We fought a fucking war to end slavery.  The fact that we had slavery is bad enough.  It’s not like the country collectively woke up and decided it was bad to own people like property and quietly go about...NOT owning people.  It took a straight up shooting war to do it.  Since when is war a moderate policy?

Same thing for voting rights, labor rights, gay rights, abortion rights, civil rights.  Every great and positive change in America happened because of protests, bloodshed,riots, assassination, amendments and people deciding to be anything but ‘centrist’ or ‘moderate’.

Trump as President exists because there are just enough white people in this country who can live with his bullshit.  They are either well off enough to survive or even thrive with his attempts at managing the economy.  Or they’re so racist that the just love him tormenting the ‘din-doos’, or the towelheads, or the spics.  Or they are a nice mixture of both.  How else do you explain the amazing lack of outrage at Trump wiping his ass with the Constitution?  

Think about it.  
America:  “WE CAN’T HAVE SOME SOCIALIST SPENDING OUR MONEY GIVING HEALTHCARE AND EDUCATION TO EVERYBODY!”

Also America; “The lying, cheating, traitor who spends millions of taxpayer dollars GOLFING is gonna be hard to beat!”   

LOL!  It’s fucking absurd!

Certainly we wouldn’t have allowed Obama to have behaved in such a manner.  We were supposed to be mad because he wore a tan suit for fuck’s sake.



Bernie Sanders is NOTHING like Trump.  It’s insulting to even compare them.  And as President if he can’t get all of his policies enacted then he’ll ge what he can...and that would be better than what we have.  Better by a LONG shot.

And now...this...



Edited by David Allen Perrin on 21 February 2020 at 3:27am
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Richard Stevens
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Posted: 21 February 2020 at 6:02am | IP Logged | 6 post reply

I think Sanders made a great point last night about how
it is the rich that live in a socialist society.

This right here. I am more of a Warren guy, but none of us have ever really lived under "true" capitalism. The governments keep funding wealthy people and the military industrial complex. If we can cut some of that out and get some benefits to the majority of people, let's try that.

All I truly want out of our government is for it to no longer be possible to go bankrupt if you get cancer. Whatever gets us there.
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John Byrne
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Posted: 21 February 2020 at 7:38am | IP Logged | 7 post reply

People seem to think Trump won by some overwhelming number of people pouring out into the voting booths for him.

•••

Which “people” is that? Even Trump knows Clinton got more votes.

But the Electoral College put him in office, and I don’t see how that scenario can fail to be repeated.

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Petter Myhr Ness
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Posted: 21 February 2020 at 7:47am | IP Logged | 8 post reply

I realise that socialism is a dirty word in America, but it has helped turn the Scandinavian countries into the ones with the highest living standard in the world. 

That's because we understand that you can't have PURE socialism. You need a healthy degree of capitalism to keep the wheels turning. 

We call that a social democracy.

It works. 
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David Allen Perrin
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Posted: 21 February 2020 at 8:14am | IP Logged | 9 post reply

A LOT of people simply did not vote in 2016.  Particularly in the key states that cost us.  The two most disliked candates in politics were up for offer. A ton of people simply said “I’ll pass.”

A Democrat with broad appeal and grassroots energy can overcome this.
Despite comments to the contrary...Bernie Sanders is actually quite popular.
  
Democrats outnumber Republicans in America.  Which is why the GOP spends so much energy suppressing votes.

If ‘we’ Democrats all did our jobs....


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John Byrne
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Posted: 21 February 2020 at 8:23am | IP Logged | 10 post reply

If ‘we’ Democrats all did our jobs....

••

…the Electoral College would still "suppress" your votes.

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Brad Wilders
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Posted: 21 February 2020 at 9:00am | IP Logged | 11 post reply

Clinton lost the electoral college by a very narrow margin in states that Democrats HAVE won.  She lost seven swing states worth 100 electoral votes that Obama had won four years earlier and by a lot.

In 2012, Obama won Michigan by 9.5% , Wisconsin by 6.9%, and Pennsylvania by 5.4% -- all states that Clinton barely lost.  

But I don't think Democrats win the next election simply by motivating their base (Trump's base will be equally motivated) because, as JBs point implies, the number of Democrats are not proportional to the distribution of electoral delegates.  If they were, we wouldn't have 26 republican governors and only 24 democrats.

The arguments being made that Bernie or Joe Biden or Bloomberg are the best candidates to defeat Trump is that they will pull enough of the non-college educated white voters, which is the demographic who propelled Trump to a narrow victory in those swing states.  Of course, to do that, the candidate also cannot alienate the other Democratic voting blocs and discourage them from showing up to the polls. 

(This is a great, but long, data-driven post-mortem of the 2016 election).  

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John Byrne
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Posted: 21 February 2020 at 9:32am | IP Logged | 12 post reply

Non-college educated White voters? The ones who think socialism and communism are the same thing?
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