Comments

1

"Mueller Finds No Collusion"

Don't worry though, conservative Democrats can still blame Jill Stein and Sanders for losing the election.

3

I'm just glad it's over so we can focus more on the shitty things we 100% know he did and continues to do. Give him hell till his heart explodes.

5

Steve Buttigieg 3rd (11%) in Iowa poll !!!

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/25/pete-buttigieg-2020-democratic-candidate-surges-third-place-new-poll

7

Mueller only indicted the people who would not give up the information he wanted. He included the implicated russkies on indictments so can never safely set foot on US soil. The mandate was to gather information about election interference and prosecute as needed along the way. Congress (gulp) gets to look at the findings, and act?
All along Mueller never intended to kick the hornets nest of indicting a sitting President, or his family, or closest advisors. That is Congress' job, which is the sad part.

8

Trump collusion is money laundering with Russian oligarchs, not trying to win the election that he actually expected/wanted to lose.

8

We should all be happy the president and his campaign wasn't found to conspire with Russia to swing an election. I hate trump, but this is good news.

10

@1- it can be both.

While I'm not a Clinton apologist, there was an amazing cascading series of events that make it remarkable that the Dems won the popular vote. I think this should be more worrisome for the left than it seems to be. Because if you think a centrist liberal had a tough road, wait til we try to run a harder left candidate.
a) concerted and well funded effort by foreign government to sway voters
b) unprecedented FBI and GOP-controlled congressional committee activity (5 years of Benghazi investigations?)
c) targeted voter suppression by the right
d) internal party fractures
Combined with an uninspiring candidate and some serious tactical errors- results in still winning the popular vote by over 2m, but losing a relatively narrow election.

But yes, Sanders supporters (people who voted for him in the primary) defected to Trump at a rate much higher than is typical for crossover. And given that crossover is more typically centrist dem to centrist republican, rather than far right to far left, that does not speak well.
All sorts of very wonky research around this, but here is a pretty simple npr article:
https://www.npr.org/2017/08/24/545812242/1-in-10-sanders-primary-voters-ended-up-supporting-trump-survey-finds

11

Trump's approval rating skyrocketed to 42% today.

12

Looks like Prezinazi AntiChrist confessing on national television that he fired James Comey to stop the Russia investigation and bragging about it to the Russian foreign minister in the Oval Office and shitposting a million lies on Twitter don’t count. Barr is a stooge that was brought on solely to facilitate the pardons and cover-ups as he did with the Iran-Contra scandal.

Not guilty by reason of wealth and white supremacy!

In much the same way that CaliguBush showed the world that our military is a “paper tiger” capable of winning small battles while disastrously losing two major wars, Prezinazi AntiChrist has demonstrated irrefutably how weak, feeble, and incompetent our democratic institutions are. And at its core, the problem isn’t that the system is corrupt, it’s that corruption is the system.

This senseless outcome that brazenly defies everything we’ve seen and heard over the last three years resolves nothing.

13

"Democrats can still blame Jill Stein "

The actual Russian stooge who thinks vaccinations cause autism?

Good luck running with Sanders in 2020 when middle class folks see their taxes will go up $5 to 10K or more a year to give upper middle class kids free college, and they will be getting health insurance from the same folks who brought you the DMV.

16

@14: Unless @3 is William Barr, there's no way he can quote from the Mueller report. It hasn't been released.

17

Keith Olbermann was refreshing the first time I saw him on TV. I thought about how Fox News had driven up Republican poll numbers by appealing to the collective Id rather than either presenting ideas in a dry and boring format or emoting without content in the same vein as Oprah’s confession culture did.

I thought this would be the key to shifting the Overton Window to the Left, after years of seeing it drift so far to the right that people who would have been considered fascists in the 1960’s were by that time in the mainstream.

While Keith did not last, his successor, Rachel Maddow did. Further, I was happy to hear she is a lesbian. Seeing a member of the LGBT community take the helm of a movement that used the Tea Party’s own tactics against it was pretty awesome.

Ironically, this movement would later equivocate the Berniecrats, the DSA, Socialist Alternative and other Left movements with the Tea Party. The Olbermann/Maddow wing of the Democratic Party was much more akin to the Tea Party, in that Olbermann himself developed the technique used during his tenure at Fox, by essentially copying the style of the Tea Party and pasting it onto the Democrats. The more bonafide Left has less in common with the Tea Party, as it doesn’t try to appeal to emotion as much as it does to logic. Ask a centrist why they support their candidate, and you’ll get a pastiche of emotions such as “Better Together”. Ask AOC, and you’ll get a discussion of how universal single payer is more efficient than the private market. Maddow in front of a camera shouts, points, uses splashy graphics and chuckles to her own sarcasm. AOC just cites numbers.

Now, the Id appeal crowd reacted to the 2016 loss with a mixture of paranoia (Putin went from running a country whose GDP is less than Portugal and only recently went from n Gatineau population growth to a steady state to this global puppet master who hypnotized all th voters in America) and rage (Jill Stein and Bernie are evil and must be attacked all the time), which is what one expects from the collective id. They decided to trust Robert Muller (why?) and declared victory as soon as he was appointed. Never mind if he’s a lifelong Republican. If any5hing, they thought, that’s even better, because then it’s bipartisan. Because there’s nothing Democrats fetishize Marie than bipartisanship. Who cares if we’re shooting ourselves in the foot, just so long as we’ve for both hands on the trigger instead of just the left hand.

Meanwhile, the Left has spent the last two years pointing to the Emoluments Clause, which is admittedly boring and doesn’t appeal to the id. But if you’re gonna ITMFA, you need a high crime or a misdemeanor. And even if he did collude with Russia, since Congress has not declared Russia an enemy state, that still wouldnt be illegal.

Charging foreign dignitaries to stay at your hotel in exchange for political favors, however, is explicitly banned by the constitution. That actually is a high crime.

It’s time to get geeky, guys. I know it’s not as exciting as reviving the Cold War, but you dont need Keith and Rachel, you need a lawyer and a stack of receipts from the hotel that occupies what used to be the DC Old Post Office.

18

Why are you just parroting the "buses were kicked out" line that places like KIRO and elsewhere are using?

The plan to end buses in the tunnel has been in the works for years. You could even argue that the tunnel was built knowing that someday it would be only for light rail.

"kicked out" implies Sound Transit just impulsively decided last week to chuck out the buses. That's not the case at all.

19

At least some millionaires were inconvenienced, lost a bunch of money and might have to go to jail. Nothing says innocent better than half your advisers being convicted felons.

20

@10 "Sanders supporters (people who voted for him in the primary) defected to Trump at a rate much higher than is typical for crossover."

Apparently not, per the article you provided:

"Schaffner tells NPR that around 12 percent of Republican primary voters ... ended up voting for Clinton. And according to one 2008 study, around 25 percent of Clinton primary voters in that election ended up voting for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., in the general. (In addition, the data showed 13 percent of McCain primary voters ended up voting for Obama, and 9 percent of Obama voters ended up voting for McCain"

So, no, Sanders supporters didn't defect at a significantly higher rate. Ironically, though, it seems like it is Hillary primary supporters who are the more fickle ones.

21

@14 How could anybody "quote the report" since hasn't even been released to congress yet, let alone the public?

22

@20 defection wasn't the issue. Not voting at all or voting for Stein was. 8 million people didn't vote. And look where we are. Sure Clinton was a piece of shit. But she was the piece of shit we had. Not the piece of shit we wanted. That's just reality.

Look. I'd vote for Sanders, Butt-dude, or Harris, or who-the-fuck-ever that will fight for some kind of progressive platform, tackle healthcare, and take climate change seriously. Stamp a D on it I'll vote for it.

But the butt hurt petulant lefties will sit it out. Just so they can claim moral superiority.

And because of that whatever progress advances that have been hard fought for the last three decades have now been ALL undone.

And it will take another decade or two to claw them back. There will be no revolution that get's them back. It will not happen.

That's what happens when you don't have power. If you do not have power — there will be no GND or anything that level smells like it for decades. When it's too late. Power is all that matters.

The difference between liberals and lefties is lefties want to be "right" on the internet more than they want to attain the power in the real world to be able to change things on the ground.

Politics is not LARPing.

23

sorry: 80 million didn't vote.

24

don't despair yet;
we're pretty sure the Senate will bring GND up for a vote.

25

@20 We can dice the numbers a couple ways- For example, nationwide only 8% of republicans or democrats defected (CBS exit poll). Both Johnson and Stein tripled their party's total share of votes from 2012. Democrats increased their share with white women- every other demographic went further right. All the examples you sight are center right or center left moving around in the middle. The bigger question is how is it that Sanders voters end up voting far right? The only issue Trump and Sanders were aligned on was trade, both of which were pretty far-right, nationalist. And from my time around the campaigns, I didn't see a lot of single-issue voters for Sanders focused on trade.

26

@10 "wait til we try to run a harder left candidate. "

When push come to shove many corporate Democrats would vote for Trump before voting for Sanders and co, which is also another reason for mobilizing the disenfranchised and radically increase voter turnout. Barring a 3-way split, the left can't win with a 60% voter turnout that is largely skewed toward older, wealthier demographics.

27

@2: Yeah, that's now the question. If he wasn't colluding - and he was acting suspicious enough that the FBI thought he might have been, which is really saying a lot - then why the hell was he doing so much to undermine the people who would have proven it? Does he ACTUALLY believe the "deep state" bullshit he peddles? Is he genuinely that stupid?

@17: I don't necessarily agree with everything contained therein, but well said.

28

Did anyone else shit their pants thinking about being hooked onto a cable and spooled up a couple hundred feet in high wind as a way of being 'rescued' from a disabled ship, or am I the only one?


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