Joe Biden

[drscorpio]

1 hour ago, speedo21 said:

What planet are you from?  Trump mopped the floor with Hagatha

The planet where Hillary was clearly ahead after all the debates. She lost because Comey dropped the fake email accusation 4 days before the election. 

[BootmanLA]

10 hours ago, Cumslut943 said:

Biden’s mentality and mental capacity is declining, which is both sad and scary to watch in a presidential candidate. If my choice is Trump or Biden, I’m picking Trump no question. Biden can’t string a sentence together let alone come up with strong initiatives that help me and our country. 

Biden's mental capacity is light years beyond Trump's at this point. Biden makes an occasional gaffe. Trump just spontaneously spews complete nonsense, from windmill cancer to thinking maybe we can cure SARS-CoV-2 with a burst of light inside the human body (hint: that level of radiation would destroy the functions of most of our internal organs). 

[BootmanLA]

5 hours ago, speedo21 said:

What planet are you from?  Trump mopped the floor with Hagatha

Trump only "mopped the floor" with Clinton if you ignore the entire substance of the debates and judge them on which candidate was the ruder asshole (a trait on which we know Trump bests everyone, hands down). 

I can guarantee if she'd won, we wouldn't have spent February and early March with a president insisting that the less than 20 cases would all be gone soon and by April we'd be completely done with this.

I can guarantee we'd never have been subjected to inanity like "windmill cancer" or any of the thousands of other truly batshit crazy things that's come out of Trump's mouth. Clinton wouldn't have appointed her daughter to important governmental bodies or made her son-in-law the point man to deal with everything from the Middle East to coronavirus.

Biden, for as many faults as he may have, is at least sane. It's a shame we can't say that about the current president, since it's now documented that he has his physicians issue fraudulent reports on his health. 

[BootmanLA]

3 hours ago, drscorpio said:

The planet where Hillary was clearly ahead after all the debates. She lost because Comey dropped the fake email accusation 4 days before the election. 

Worse than that: it was on October 28 (roughly 12 days before election day on November 8). It's worse because in many states, early voting had begun. Here in Louisiana, where you and I both live, it opened on October 25 and closed November 1. Comey's announcement saying "Never mind, there's nothing new here" came on November 6 - after it was too late for most early voters to change their minds, and too late for the word to effectively spread that the "new" investigation was a bigger bust than the first one.

There's question as to whether that provided the margin in the three relevant states that effectively elected Trump on their own. There's better evidence that Jill Stein, a fake candidate backed by the far-right in hopes of taking votes from Clinton) sucked away enough votes from Clinton in those states to throw the election to Trump. Given Stein's connections with Russia and how opaque Green Party finances are, it's a good bet that her campaign was paid for by pro-Trump forces trying to steal the election.

[drscorpio]

Even if Stein isn't a Russian asset, there was an active social media campaign financed by them convincing Sanders supporters to vote for her instead of Clinton. I have plenty of friends who fell for all of the "Bernie was robbed" bullshit. 

[BootmanLA]

2 minutes ago, drscorpio said:

Even if Stein isn't a Russian asset, there was an active social media campaign financed by them convincing Sanders supporters to vote for her instead of Clinton. I have plenty of friends who fell for all of the "Bernie was robbed" bullshit. 

That's continued to this day. Trump himself clearly wanted Sanders as his opponent because he was pretty sure Sanders would be easier to beat once he was publicly tarred with the "socialist" label in nationwide media. Trump has for months been "warning" Sanders supporters that their votes were being canceled out by the big bad Democratic machine, all to foment unrest and convince them to refuse to support Biden.

And anyone who doesn't think the GOP has a 30-year oppo research file on Sanders, ready to drop if he'd gotten the nomination, is nuts. Of course they do. It would be professional malpractice for the GOP not to have done that work. They haven't used it in the past because there was no reason to - Sanders wasn't the nominee and hasn't been close to becoming the nominee either election. They're not going to dump everything early, possibly get Sanders out of the primary race in favor of a stronger candidate; they planned to save up the opposition file and use it in the general election.

[drscorpio]

I like Sanders ideas for the most part. I supported him 4 years ago. But he was never close to getting the nomination either time. The bulk of the Democratic Party is too mainstream for him. If all the young folks actually hold onto their progressive values, we might see a really left wing Democratic Party, but right now it is a little left of center at most. 

[evilalex]

I'm not American, so I don't get a vote. 

However, I would have much preferred Bernie, then Warren. I think the media coverage against Bernie was excessively negative. That said, I hope people vote for Biden. I think Trump might seriously get reelected, or I did, before his handling of covid. The polls were super wrong last time, so I'm not even bothering to check them now. I'm a bit of a political junkie. 

[C10H15N]

Don’t make the mistake of thinking Trump is a Republican.  He’s a life long New York Democrat who, like Bernie, ran as a Populist - he just did it on the Republican ticket.

The GOP establishment hates him more than the Democrats. 

[drscorpio]

I don't think it was polls being wrong in 2016 as much as the analysis being shallow and short-sighted. Nate Silver at 538.com started warning it was going to be very close 3-4 days before the election, but most media outlets didn't want to push that narrative. Remember Clinton handily won the popular vote which is what polls measure. Her campaign ignored the "Rust Belt" thinking after 2008 and 2012 it was locked in for the Democrats, and the Electoral College came down to just the matter of a handful of votes in each of those states. 

[evilalex]

I hope you're right. 

[BootmanLA]

4 hours ago, C10H15N said:

Don’t make the mistake of thinking Trump is a Republican.  He’s a life long New York Democrat who, like Bernie, ran as a Populist - he just did it on the Republican ticket.

The GOP establishment hates him more than the Democrats. 

First, there's no single "GOP Establishment". There are the country club Republicans, who ran the show until Reagan came along. There are the anti-tax pro-rich Republicans, whose only real concern is making the rich richer. There are the Talibangelicals, who want to ban abortion, eliminate gay civil rights, and return women to second-class status. These last two groups more or less split power from Reagan forward, with the anti-tax crowd mostly in charge.

What most of them have in common is this: they may personally hate Trump, but they don't give a shit; for the latter two groups, in particular, he's delivered for them. The Religious Reich has gotten a buttload of federal judges confirmed since McConnell refused to confirm scores of Obama's appointees in the final two years of his term; one out of four federal appeals judges is now a Trump appointee and most of them are young (50 or under), so they'll be on the bench for 30 or more years, handing down horrible decision after horrible decision, rolling back decades of progress.

And the anti-Tax people got a $2 trillion handout in 2017 (spread over ten years, but still), of which approximately 126% is going to them (because on the low end, people will actually owe MORE taxes by the end of the tax bill's term). 

They may both hate Trump, but they're solidly behind his re-election because they know if they can get four more years of judges and another tax cut through, they're set for life.

As for populism: there's more than one strain of it and some of them conflict with others. Populism is a broad description of policy means and goals, not a coherent political philosophy. Putting Sanders and Trump in the same basket politically is beyond dumb.

[BootmanLA]

4 hours ago, evilalex said:

I'm not American, so I don't get a vote. 

However, I would have much preferred Bernie, then Warren. I think the media coverage against Bernie was excessively negative. That said, I hope people vote for Biden. I think Trump might seriously get reelected, or I did, before his handling of covid. The polls were super wrong last time, so I'm not even bothering to check them now. I'm a bit of a political junkie. 

Actually, the polls were pretty much right at the end. The problem was that the polls being looked at were national polls, which (in the last two weeks) suggested that the gap was narrowing but Clinton had about a 3% lead in the polls. Which is pretty close to what she actually got.

The problem with the polls is that nobody was really checking the state-level polls in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania (or at least, not enough attention was paid to them). The focus in state-level polls was on more traditionally swing states like Ohio and Florida, which had voted for Bush but which had flipped to Obama in 2008. Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania hadn't gone for a Republican for president since 1992 so most of the media didn't really assume they were in play.

If we didn't have such an insanely stupid system like the Electoral College, set up to protect the institution of chattel slavery of black people, Trump would never have won. For that matter, Bush wouldn't have won the first time, in 2000 (and thus wouldn't have been in position to run for re-election as a wartime president in 2004). In fact, with an actual vote of the people, which is what every other democratic nation on earth uses, we'd probably never have a Republican president again unless they seriously rebooted their platform.

And if we didn't have the even stupider system that lets a person in Shithole, Wyoming have as much voice in the US Senate as 68 Californians have, combined, the Republicans wouldn't have had control of the Senate in about 20 or 25 years, either.

[Danthebttmman57]

I hate politics----- but after watching Trump's daily press briefings---- he is mentally unsound---- he elicits fear in all his advisors---- Pence appears so medically sedated --- McDougnough is hell bent on destroying any and all democrats----- if you have a pension as a teacher, law enforcement or firefighter he wants your state to go bankrupt. 

The basic Republican point of view is kneel and submit or we WILL destroy your life, just keep sending YOUR money !!

[tallslenderguy]

Nothing fills me with feelings of 'conspiracy' like an american presidential race. my reason does kick in and i know better (i hope lol) than there being some powerful organization pulling all the strings behind scenes, but over all, i think presidents in america are bought and paid for, not elected. 

i watched several of the democratic debates and felt a tiny bit encouraged (but only a "tiny bit") by some of the articulate intelligence of some of the candidates. But with each successive debate i watched the intelligence wane and get replaced by canned slogans designed to have mass effect. sigh.  When it came down to Biden, my response was WTF?!?  i kinda liked the cute gay guy, the two women and Bernie (though concerned about his age).

 Biden was not even on my list?  Yeah, i too have concerns about his mental decline, but that is not a hidden issue, eh?  If it's obvious to us, it's obvious to the powers behind him and the fact that he is still their choice sort of supports the notion that presidents are token at best?  That others in power are making the day to day decisions? Reagan was in mental decline the last couple of years of his presidency. 

i don't think we really have a government "of the people, by the people and for the people." That representative government is long gone. 

i read a book a few years ago. "Infidel" by Ayaan Hirsi Ali.  It's a fascinating biography of a woman who grew up in a strict Muslim culture in Somalia and Arabia. She managed to escape the constraints of her cultural upbringing (thus the books title: "Infidel"), immigrate to the Netherlands and in a short period of time become a citizen and member of parliament.  To me, that speaks of a representative government. 

In the US, we get handed two candidates every four years and are told that constitutes a "choice."  i cannot remember an election where i ever felt represented.