With two miniscule states out of the way in the Democratic election process, and a third around the corner, the pundits and media prognosticators are so busy projecting the final winner that they are barely covering what is actually going on in the battle. So far we have the results from two under inhabited states, both with almost 100% white populations. It means nothing. It will still mean nothing after Nevada and South Carolina vote. In fact voting trends will be insignificant until after Super Tuesday.
Until then we should not be concentrating on how many votes have been cast for who, but what the candidates have to say about what policies they will embrace and how they plan to beat Trump. I mean, that is what this election is about, isn’t it?
What is just as important is the down-ticket vote because unless the Democrats get the House and Senate along with the Presidency, none of their policies will get implemented.
Sure, the discussion of who will best stand up to an incumbent President with zero morals and overwhelmingly criminal tendencies is an important part of the discussion, but it’s not the only part. We already know that all of the candidates are pretty much on the same page about what has to be done to put this country back on a course where it needs to be in order to function as the greatest nation in the world. We are also of a mind that most of the candidates would probably beat Trump one on one. Right now that is the major bone of contention; who looks like they have the best shot? I know that many of my contemporaries will dispute this point but I am one of those who believe that Trump will inevitably, through his egomaniacally driven actions, cut his own throat.
But before he does that, we really have to decide who will be the most able opponent and who would make the best president.
I have stated previously which candidates I thought would make the best opponents and why; so I won’t go into all the details here, but I will say that in the end I think Mayor Pete would make the best debate opponent for a number of already stated reasons. But once that is worked out, the next question becomes who would make the best President. The immediate thought that comes to mind is that women being considerably smarter than men, Amy or Elizabeth should be the choice but again Pete intrudes on the choice because, I believe he is the most intelligent of the candidates and other than possibly Biden or Bloomberg, he has the widest world view. He is also one of the safest in terms of policy goals because he seems to be looking to attack what he can achieve without reaching for goals that, because of their size or potential opposition, could endanger his whole agenda.
Obviously I am leaning toward Buttigieg as my candidate but we are still a long way off and I believe, it’s still too early to pick one. But that also means that all these ludicrous projections have to cease. Predicting anything based on less than one percent of the votes is a fool’s errand but it could also be dangerous because, considering peoples propensity to be led by media, it has a definite influence on votes yet to be cast.
Steve Kornacki, the crazed interpreter of any and all numbers acquired by MSNBC is doing far more damage than all the Trump ads right now. There is indeed a time for Kornacki but it’s not now. It’s after about 60% of the votes are counted and that’s not for quite a while. Let’s keep Steve in a box until we have a real election in progress. That’s the time to spring him and all his fanciful opinions on Trump and his strategically impaired planners.
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Ohio gym teacher, Congressman and Trump hit man, Jim Jordan is back in the news. It’s about when Jordan was the assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State back in the mid-1990s. It seems that the team doctor at that time, had a penchant for young boys. He was so invested in them that he ended up abusing around 350 of them and some of them went to team officials including Jordan, none of whom, including Jordan, did anything about it. In a recent hearing the brother of one of the wrestlers who had been abused, and a victim himself called out Jordan in an investigation. He described a half hour phone call in which Jordan sobbed and pleaded with him to go against his brother and exonerate him. The young man testified that he refused.
The doctor in this case is a criminal sexual predator who obviously suffers from a driving obsession he is unable to control but what is Jordan? He is very simply nothing but a coward who ignored his responsibility to these students in order to curry favor with a school administration that was trying to cover the whole thing up. This whole scenario reveals Jordan to be unfit for any public office and in fact a criminal himself since he has acted as an accomplice to the criminal doctor.
In his job in the House, Jordan has again acted as an accomplice; this time to a criminal President, thereby proving that this cowardly punk has no business being anywhere in our government and must be driven from office in November.
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Watched a Bernie rally the other night and it appeared surprisingly like one conducted by Trump. It seems that Bernie doesn’t have fans or followers but cultish, uncontrolled nuts to whom the pejorative label “Bernie Bros” has been applied. This is dangerous and while it always helps to have followers who will follow you anywhere, it can be damaging when they are so out of control that you can’t reign them is. Such was the case this week when Bernie Bros threatened a couple of union officials in Vegas because the union refused to endorse Bernie.
Of course Bernie came out and stated that he didn’t agree with this course of action but what he should have done was fire the perpetrators from his campaign team or if they were not employees, condemned them by name for their reprehensible behavior. That he didn’t do this is a blot on Bernie’s character and another check on the “anyone but Bernie board.”
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I like Elizabeth Warren. I’ve liked her ever since she emerged onto the scene She’s smart, functional, full of energy and good ideas and she sure as hell has any number of plans. But something about her as a president has always bothered me. This Sunday I realized what it was. I was watching her speak about taking money from rich people to finance campaigns and how it put the candidate who took such money in debt to the donor and how she would not, like Pete, take such money and I realized what it was that was wrong with Warren. She’s a zealot. That’s a big problem because zealots, who often arrive on the scene imbued with the right message are often so immersed in it that they don’t hear any other messages, and that’s where the Kool-Aid comes in.
Elizabeth was so immersed in the purity campaign that she has lost all understanding of two very important facts. One: it takes money to win a political campaign and two: the fault of money undermining the ethics of congress lies with the men and women in congress, not with the money. Sure a lot of the billionaires putting money into the hands of congressional campaign fund raisers are unethical scum trying to buy an advantage for their businesses, but they would not be successful if the congressmen they were buying were honest to start with. There’s nothing wrong with taking a donation from anyone as long as there is no quid pro quo. Remember that little phrase? Our current crook in the White House made it famous.
Let’s take Pete Buttigieg for example. I’m sure that many of the millionaires who are contributing to his campaign do so because they believe he is the smartest guy in the room, that he will make the best President and that they want to help him get there. They may also believe that in helping Buttigieg they might, somewhere down the line, get into a position of helping themselves or their business. But as long as the understanding between both parties is that the contribution creates no indebtedness, that’s on them, not on Buttigieg.
Warren’s problem as stated, was that being a zealot she couldn’t see the forest for the trees and could only take in the evils of campaign finance and not the good that the funding can be put to.
This is a far different situation than what is now happening in the Trump administration where everything including the flusher in the Oval office bathroom is for sale.
Unfortunately, Warren didn’t see this until now because being a zealot her view of the problem was so concentrated as to be non-functional. But now, it seems, just to prove me right she has seen the light and has completely reversed her course and decided to take that PAC money just as her opponents are doing. Did all those crooks suddenly become honest? Of course not! Elizabeth and more probably her advisors, finally came to the conclusion that there was no path to the White House unless she was able to pay the bills.
It’s interesting that the other zealot, Bernie Sanders has always had the support of a huge PAC, Our Revolution plus the biggest nurses union in the country that together have supplied his campaign with as much or more money than all the other non-billionaire candidates combined.
So let’s suppress the purity tests, as the prescient Mayor Pete said at an earlier debate, until we can pass them ourselves.
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Donald Trump made a great play during the State of the Union Lie to attract support from the African American community, a voting block that by any intelligent standard justifiably hates everything about this racist clown. He gave an award to an old Tuskegee Airman and he gave a scholarship to a young black girl. He took a big chance of angering his white supremacist base but being Trump he couldn’t help but fuck it up when he gave the highest civilian award to Rush Limbaugh. Now we all feel sorry for Rush who is suffering from cancer, but to give such an award to a blatant racist, terminal liar and big time bigot was a slap in the face to everyone who has already received that award and a direct insult to the black community. But that’s just Trump, a needy fat baby who can’t stop himself from indulging in suicidal behavior even as he plots to get richer and more powerful.