Though-provoking essay: are Democrats, save Biden, running for president of Twitter, speaking to a progressive majority that doesn’t exist anywhere outside social media? https://t.co/ALTlZf4gel pic.twitter.com/frRPQv0YvL
— Michael Barbaro (@mikiebarb) September 14, 2019
.@MelissaTweets More on Texas' "political shift," something you've tweeted about a few times: "After mass shootings, gun advocates in #Texas worry about a political shift" 🤷♂️ cc. @DLoesch #ElPaso https://t.co/L7gpc8fkGC
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) September 14, 2019
Are Hong Kong’s Protestors More ‘American’ Than the Socialist Democrats? https://t.co/b4p6bY5zX1
— = Linda🇺🇸Wray = (@_NCPatriot_) September 14, 2019
We have a choice: Will we let socialists like @AOC be the face of our future? Or will a new generation of conservatives step up & lead us? We're launching New Faces GOP to help identify & support the next generation of GOP leaders. Learn more: https://t.co/UrarCUSAIl pic.twitter.com/LgwTrS8En6
— New Faces GOP (@NewFacesGOP) September 13, 2019
.@aoc response is the Democratic party in a nutshell. They are more offended by truthful words than the acts of their political ideology that has killed millions of innocent victims. I don't care about @AOC feelings - I care about stopping her lies about the lies of socialism.
— Elizabeth Heng (@ElizabethHeng) September 13, 2019
.@instapundit: LEFTISTS ARE STILL TRYING TO COPE WITH THE LOSS OF THEIR ACCUSTOMED IMPUNITY: The Ad That Ran During The Dem Debate That Has Ocasio-Cortez #AOC Outraged. https://t.co/KX333Ts43I pic.twitter.com/425d475Z5y
— Sissy Willis (@SissyWillis) September 13, 2019
Azealia Banks is in Sweden and she is a MOOD.
— Annika H Rothstein (@truthandfiction) August 25, 2019
“This socialism shit is bogus” 😂😂 pic.twitter.com/EQJvM0yxMd
Bernie Sanders' famed $27 donors are split in 2020's sprawling Democratic field https://t.co/lZmUtzzYTR
— Seema (@LATSeema) August 21, 2019
Small-dollar donors made Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential bid one of the most successful insurgent campaigns in Democratic Party history, allowing him to be competitive with establishment favorite Hillary Clinton."Washed up."
But in the 2020 race, nearly 1.7 million, or more than 80%, of the donors who fueled his earlier run have stayed on the sidelines, according to a Times analysis of campaign finance disclosures through June 30.
The 2016 donors who are contributing this election cycle have given more than $32 million to the Democratic field. More than $16.2 million of that went to Sanders, making up about 45% of the money he has raised. But nearly as much went to his rivals, a sign of how split Democrats are as they try to figure out the best candidate to take on President Trump.
“Bernie’s washed up. I just think he’s too old,” Audrey Tieger, 68, said of the 77-year-old Sanders...
“It’s quite a transition from being invisible to being visible in a lethal way. It’s something new to my community. We are used to the basic darkness of racism, not this.” https://t.co/Dap8EGaIWe— Patricia Mazzei (@PatriciaMazzei) August 7, 2019
For Latinos, the El Paso slaughter & its bigoted motive have marked a devastating new low in the Trump era. Stay tuned for coverage of the candidates later today. /4 https://t.co/wFv1f4IXO6— Michael Finnegan (@finneganLAT) August 5, 2019
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — The massacre at an El Paso Walmart store on Saturday hasn’t diminished Silvia Ivania’s desire to move to the United States — even if the killer of 22 people was apparently motivated by hatred of Latino immigrants.
“That’s something that can happen anywhere,” said Ivania, 37, a citizen of Honduras, speaking at the Good Samaritan migrant shelter in this border city across the Rio Grande from El Paso. “The violence in Honduras is a lot worse than in the United States.”
She and several other migrants interviewed Tuesday at the shelter — temporary home to about 100, mostly Central Americans, but including U.S.-bound Cubans, Africans and others — agreed that the mass killing would not dissuade them.
“If anything, I want to go to the United States even more than before,” said Danieska Del Toro, 34, from Havana. “They arrested the guy, right? Maybe he was crazy. In Cuba we have violence too, even if the regime says there is none.”
Along the nearby Rio Grande, which separates the U.S. and Mexico, scattered groups of migrants could be seen Tuesday scampering across the river — which, at the moment, has been reduced to a few scattered puddles amid a narrow ribbon of green, and easy to traverse on foot. Its shallow depths seem to mock signs warning people of the danger of drowning.
At midday, amid 100-degree-plus temperatures, about 20 people — some holding their children’s hands — surrendered to U.S. Border Patrol vans waiting on the other side. As is usually the case, the migrants didn’t attempt to evade U.S. immigration authorities, but sought them out.
Mexican National Guard troops posted on the south side said they urged border crossers not to proceed, but didn’t prevent their passage.
“That’s their decision; we just tell them of the risks,” said one Mexican National Guard officer, who declined to be named because she wasn’t authorized to speak publicly.
Sad to see so many San Antonians as 2019 maximum donors to Donald Trump — the owner of @BillMillerBarBQ, owner of the @HistoricPearl, realtor Phyllis Browning, etc.
— Joaquin Castro (@Castro4Congress) August 6, 2019
Their contributions are fueling a campaign of hate that labels Hispanic immigrants as ‘invaders.’ pic.twitter.com/YT85IBF19u
MSNBC's Willie Geist to Joaquin Castro after he doxxed @realDonaldTrump supporters:
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) August 7, 2019
"These people are undoubtedly are already being harassed ... they will be because you put their names in public."
Castro later responds: "I didn't create the graphic."
Give me a break Castro. pic.twitter.com/XgBw8fkevA
Voters have repeatedly punished both Democrats and Republicans who've threatened to take away their health coverage, no matter how flawed it is. Are Dems ready to risk trying again? https://t.co/thjrXEdzsB
— Noam Levey (@NoamLevey) August 2, 2019
WASHINGTON — Sharp disagreements among the presidential hopefuls at this week’s debates have crystallized a critical and explosive political question: Are Democrats willing to upend health coverage for tens of millions of their fellow Americans?Still more.
The party is closer than it’s been in decades to embracing a healthcare platform that would move all Americans out of their current insurance and into a single government-run plan.
Plans pushed by three of the four leading candidates — Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Kamala Harris of California — differ in their particulars but would all end the job-based system that provides coverage to more than 150 million people.
That’s a hugely risky strategy, as more-centrist rivals reminded the three senators during the two nights of heated, sometimes confusing, debates.
Sweeping healthcare plans have never fared well in American politics.
For decades, voters repeatedly have punished presidents and Congresses — Democratic and Republican alike — who have threatened to take away existing health plans, no matter how flawed.
Just last year, the GOP suffered historic losses in the House of Representatives after the party’s unsuccessful effort to roll back the 2010 Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.
But at a time when rising insurance deductibles and medical bills are crippling growing numbers of American families, many Democrats on the party’s left believe public discontent with the current system has changed that dynamic.
“It’s time that we separate employers from the kind of healthcare people get,” Harris said Wednesday night, acknowledging that her “Medicare for all” plan would, after a lengthy phase-in period, end job-based insurance.
Harris, Sanders and Warren have made Medicare for all a central plank of their campaigns, riding a wave of discontent over rising medical costs to call for a historic expansion of government insurance.
Their more-moderate rivals say the three have misjudged the public mood and that by overreaching, they would squander an opportunity to enact significant, if incremental, reforms.
A survey earlier this year by the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation found that support for a single government plan fell from 56% to 37% when respondents were told that it might involve eliminating private insurance companies or requiring more taxes.
“It doesn’t make sense for us to take away insurance from half the people in this room,” warned Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, who is among many Democratic presidential candidates, including former Vice President Joe Biden, who back more limited approaches.
The more-centrist Democrats would preserve the current employer-based system, as well as state Medicaid programs and the insurance marketplaces created by the 2010 healthcare law.
They would add an additional choice to allow Americans to buy into a Medicare-like government plan, often called a “public option.”
“Every single person in America would be able to buy into that option if they didn’t like their employer plan,” Biden said Wednesday.
Critics on the left say that approach would ultimately cost more and would preserve an outsized role for private insurance companies.
“We have tried this experiment with the insurance companies,” Warren said from the debate stage Tuesday. “And what they’ve done is they’ve sucked billions of dollars out of our healthcare system. And they force people to have to fight to try to get the healthcare coverage that their doctors and nurses say that they need.”
But threatening Americans’ current health coverage has proved disastrous for previous Democratic efforts to expand protections, including President Clinton’s doomed initiative in the early 1990s.
The 2010 healthcare law was almost sunk by labor unions angry about a new tax on the kind of generous health plans many of their members enjoy.
And even though the law was designed to have minimal impact on the existing insurance system, President Obama faced a firestorm when a few million people found their health plans canceled after new rules took effect requiring plans to offer more-comprehensive benefits.
“Traditionally, fear of losing benefits — however flawed they may be — trumps hope of getting something better,” said Chris Jennings, an influential Washington health policy advisor who worked for Clinton and Obama...
Democratic 2020 race up for grabs: Half of voters have changed their minds since spring, poll shows https://t.co/gSqcytnysh
— L.A. Times Politics (@latimespolitics) July 29, 2019
WASHINGTON — As Democratic presidential hopefuls prepare for their second round of debates this week, a new poll finds that half of likely primary voters have changed their minds since the spring, highlighting how unsettled the contest remains.
Former Vice President Joe Biden continues to lead in the latest USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times nationwide poll, while three senators, Kamala Harris of California, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, are essentially tied for second place. That marks an improvement for Harris and Warren and a decline for Sanders since April, when the poll last tested the Democratic race.
More notably, about half of the voters in the poll have changed their preferences since the April survey -- a reminder that at this point of the campaign, most voters don’t have firm commitments.
Voters at this stage of the campaign are “corks on the water floating around,” said Mike Murphy, the longtime Republican strategist who is co-director of USC Dornsife’s Center for the Political Future, one of the sponsors of the poll. That’s particularly true for voters nationwide, who have less exposure to the candidates than voters in states with early primaries.
The volatility has a limit, however. The vast majority of voters who switched since April moved among the top four candidates or between them and undecided status. The mass of candidates languishing at 1% or lower hasn’t benefited.
Biden continues to lead the poll, with 28%. Harris was at 10%, putting her in an effective tie with Warren, also at 10% and Sanders, at 11%. An additional 25% said they were undecided when presented with a list of 25 people who have declared they are running.
Beyond the top candidates, the poll found only Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas having more than 1% support. Buttigieg’s support has grown since April and now stands at 5%, while O’Rourke’s has shrunk to 3% -- all shifts within the poll’s margin of error.
“When your front-runner is at 28% and undecided is at 25%, it’s a pretty fluid race,” said Jill Darling, the poll director.
Unlike some other public opinion samples, the USC/L.A. Times poll surveys a panel of more than 7,000 members, tracking their views over time. Polls using the panel can look at how and when specific voters have changed their preferences.
In the primary contest so far, the first round of debates in June appears to have played a big role in changing minds. Harris, in particular, gained support among people who watched the debate, during which she forcefully challenged Biden over his nostalgia about working with segregationist senators early in his career. The exchange appears to have boosted Harris without doing long-term damage to Biden, who gained roughly as many supporters as he lost.
People who reported that they watched the debate -- about 3 in 10 of those who said they planned to vote in a Democratic primary -- were more likely to have switched than others. But even many voters who did not watch the debate changed their minds.
That churn has affected candidates in different ways. Biden and Sanders do best among voters who have backed the same candidate all along, while Harris and Warren, who each gained lots of new followers, do better among those who have changed their minds. About 7 in 10 of those backing Harris and 8 in 10 backing Warren were converts since April, the poll found.
Sanders sits at the opposite extreme -- about 8 in 10 of those backing him now also backed him in April. That’s both a strength for him and a weakness.
The Vermont senator has a solid core of supporters, many of whom grew attached to him in 2016 when he ran against Hillary Clinton. One indication of that: He did best among the roughly 1 in 4 voters who neither watched the June debate nor heard or read about it.
Outside of his core support, Sanders has been losing backers, and unlike other candidates, he has picked up relatively few new ones. Almost half the supporters he had in April have moved elsewhere.
About 1 in 10 former Sanders backers now say they’re undecided. Twice as many, however, now back Biden.
That’s a reminder of another important fact: Voters aren’t as ideological as analysts sometimes make them out to be.
Sanders has staked out the left-most position in the contest. Warren shares many of his policy views. Biden has defined himself as a centrist. But nearly three times as many former Sanders backers moved to Biden as moved to Warren.
Biden and Sanders both do better with non-college educated voters than with those who have graduated from college...
The likes of Fredrick Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Fredrick Engels, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and Michael Foucault began a #Socialist revolution that is transforming out society’s cultural foundations. #Socialism— The Epoch Times (@EpochTimes) July 19, 2019
Commentary by Dr. Charles McVety https://t.co/jFJ4AGbozt
#Democrats hate America. 🤷♂️ #July4th #Patriotism #Dems #Antifa #AntiAmericanism cc. @MichelleMalkin 😯 https://t.co/KH2RqkYKTd— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) July 3, 2019
The latest overall declines in patriotism are largely driven by Democrats, whose self-reported pride has historically been lower and has fluctuated more than Republicans'. Democrats' latest 22% extreme pride reading is the group's lowest in Gallup's 19 years of measurement, and is half of what it was several months before Donald Trump's 2016 election victory.
For their part, most Republicans have remained extremely proud of their country, and the latest 76% reading is just 10 points below the high recorded in 2003. Even when Barack Obama was in office, Republicans' extreme pride never fell below 68%.
Independents have historically been less proud of the U.S. than Republicans have been; currently, 41% express extreme pride -- which is, by one point, the lowest reading in the trend.
Several subgroups that typically identify as Democrats -- women, liberals and younger adults -- all express lower levels of extreme U.S. pride than their counterparts...
In The Red Decade, Eugene Lyons was documenting not just a historical moment but also a species of historical illiteracy as unchanging as it is poisonous, its utopianism able to flourish only at the expense of independent thought. https://t.co/dr0DOYcGgE
— City Journal (@CityJournal) June 25, 2019
It may be that the best book that will ever be written about today’s progressive mind-set was published in 1941. That in The Red Decade author Eugene Lyons was, in fact, describing the Communist-dominated American Left of the Depression-wracked 1930s and 1940s makes his observations even more meaningful, for it is sobering to be confronted with how little has been gained by hard experience. The celebration of feelings over reason? The certainty of moral virtue? The disdain for tradition and the revising of history for ideological ends? The embrace of the latest definition of correct thought? Lyons was one of the most gifted reporters of his time, and among the bravest, and his story of the spell cast by Stalinist-tinged social-justice activism over that day’s purported best and brightest—literary titans, Hollywood celebrities, leading academics, religious leaders, media heavies—would be jaw-dropping if it weren’t so eerily familiar...
Read to the bottom to find out what mindfulness tells you about debate prep. https://t.co/RqGuG5VeWE— Janet Hook (@hookjan) June 21, 2019
With so many candidates onstage, the Democratic presidential debates risk becoming a stilted, parallel-play affair, with candidates trying to squeeze scripted messages into tiny scraps of airtime.More.
But the prospects of an unruly political feeding frenzy, particularly on the second night of the two-day extravaganza, have soared as former Vice President Joe Biden has thrown chum in the water: His provocative comments about race will tempt candidates to abandon restraint and go on the attack.
The back-to-back debates on Wednesday and Thursday nights could be a pivot point in the Democrats’ primary campaign, which for months has seen candidates refraining from criticizing one another — or doing so only in veiled terms.
It will be a high-stakes test for the biggest primary campaign field ever, which includes three black candidates, one Latino, six women, two Asian Americans and an openly gay man.
The lineup includes Oprah Winfrey’s spiritual advisor and a congressman who meditates; the mayor of the nation’s largest city and the mayor of South Bend, Ind. The oldest candidate was born before Pearl Harbor; the youngest when Ronald Reagan was president.
Some are well-known figures; more are obscure and thirsty for national attention.
They will all come together for the first time in a scramble to make an impression, avoid gaffes, draw contrasts and send a message. All in seven minutes or less, the estimated amount of airtime each candidate will get in the two-hour sessions. The debates will be televised on NBC, MSNBC and Telemundo starting at 6 p.m. PDT each night.
Only half the field will have a direct shot at Biden: With so many running for the nomination, the Democratic National Committee capped debate participants at 20 — three others didn’t meet the fundraising and polling criteria to make the stage — and split them between the two nights, with 10 for each session.
As the clear front-runner in early polls, Biden already had a target on his back. That bull’s-eye got bigger on Tuesday after he spoke nostalgically of his “civil” relationships with segregationists in the 1970s Senate and made a joke about not being called “boy” by one of them.
So far, Biden has pursued a strategy of trying to stay above the fray, looking past his primary rivals to focus on President Trump. The Thursday night debate, in which he’ll be at center stage, flanked by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, will test that approach.
Sanders, who is running second in many polls behind Biden but has appeared to lose some support in recent weeks, is preparing to draw a strong contrast between his democratic socialist vision and what he calls Biden’s “middle ground” approach on issues like healthcare and trade.
“Biden wants to skate on the suggestion that we are all shades of the same gray,” said Faiz Shakir, Sanders’ campaign manager. “Bernie wants to make clear that you have fundamentally different choices to make between governing vision, philosophy and how we are going to shape the agenda. That choice has to be drawn out.”
Biden backers think blunt attacks on him will backfire.
“The front-runner position always puts you as a target,” said Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.). “People don’t want the personal attacks. We’ve seen enough with our current president.”
When almost all the candidates appeared at South Carolina Democratic party events last weekend, none of them brought up the segregationists controversy.
Sanders has also been studying up on other rivals, where they stand on key issues like Medicare for all, and what they have said about him. He will be sharing a stage with former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, for example, who has criticized Sanders’ brand of democratic socialism...
Democrats’ Medicare for None plan is another untested, far-left fantasy designed to destroy Medicare and take away private insurance from more than 180 million Americans. pic.twitter.com/1rDCdcfYGe
— Leader McConnell (@senatemajldr) May 2, 2019
I was highly amused at reading this article: "Poll: 38 percent say Ocasio-Cortez 'villain' in New York losing Amazon HQ deal."RTWT.
Apparently, New Yorkers are so badly educated that they didn’t understand the side effects of electing socialists.
You see, electing socialists always results in businesses moving away, disappearing, or never setting up in your town at all.
There are reasons for this, reasons usually tied in with how socialists view the world.
For instance, they don’t understand where money/wealth comes from.
It used to be, for old-time Marxists, that money was created by labor. That notion is crazy enough, since you can labor long and hard and not create anything of value. (See, for instance, my 13-year apprenticeship in writing commercially viable fiction.) Or you can do very little labor and create something of great value. (C. S. Lewis’s Narnia chronicles were written in a freakishly short time for many writers.)
But Marxism has come a long way, baby, by becoming the politics of choice of spoiled upper-class darlings who have never done any work in their lives.
To them – judging by my kids' school books, my leftist colleagues' vagaries and, yes, Alexandria Occasional Cortex’s eructation – wealth is something that just exists, kind of free-form. It can be stolen and hoarded, but not actually created in any sense of the word.
This is why socialists are convinced that we stole our wealth from the sh**holes of the world. (No, seriously. My kids’ history and geography books all said this.) Also, it’s why poor Occasional Cortex, whom no one ever accused of an overabundance of brains, thought that she was saving the people of New York money by chasing Amazon away...
Why Doesn't AOC Want to Vote on the Green New Deal?https://t.co/vlrYjH3ewN
— PJ Media (@PJMedia_com) March 25, 2019
The GOP’s whole game of wasting votes in Congress to target others “on the record”, for leg they have no intent to pass, is a disgrace.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) March 23, 2019
Stop wasting the American peoples’ time + learn to govern. Our jobs aren’t for campaigning, & that’s exactly what these bluff-votes are for. https://t.co/ELzpQhlezo
