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2020 Democratic Presidential Nominees

This is good.

 
How do you guys feel about Andrew Yang? He takes some positions I disagree with like universal basic income for one, despite interesting ways he proposes to fund it, but overall he seems to be a Liberal with a pragmatic view of capitalism and how it can better peoples live when regulated properly. Thoughts?
 
Democrats allow candidates to qualify for presidential debates with grass-roots donor numbers

Candidates can qualify either by attracting campaign donations from at least 65,000 people, including at least 200 people from at least 20 states, or by registering at least 1 percent in three state or national polls from a list of surveys approved by the party.

The only way to qualify for early Democratic debates in 2015 was to register at least 1 percent in three national polls.

“Because of the size of the field and because it is early in the cycle, the polling requirements alone may not be enough,” said a Democratic National Committee official, who requested anonymity to describe the plans.

The first set of debates will be broadcast in June by NBC, MSNBC and Telemundo, followed by CNN-sponsored debates in July. Both sets of debates will be broadcast on weeknights in prime time. They will be streamed online free, with no more than 10 candidates onstage at any one time.
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This is going to be a mess.
 
No Joe! Joe Biden’s disastrous legislative legacy

a.k.a. why I won't be supporting Joe Biden

By the 1980s, Biden had begun to see political gold in the harsh antidrug legislation that had been pioneered by drug warriors such as Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon, and would ultimately lead to the age of mass incarceration for black Americans. One of his Senate staffers at the time recalls him remarking, “Whenever people hear the words ‘drugs’ and ‘crime,’ I want them to think ‘Joe Biden.’” Insisting on anonymity, this former staffer recollected how Biden’s team “had to think up excuses for new hearings on drugs and crime every week—any connection, no matter how remote. He wanted cops at every public meeting—you’d have thought he was running for chief of police.”

The ensuing legislation might also have brought to voters’ minds the name of the venerable Thurmond, Biden’s partner in this effort. Together, the pair sponsored the 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act, which, among other repressive measures, abolished parole for federal prisoners and cut the amount of time by which sentences could be reduced for good behavior. The bipartisan duo also joined hands to cheerlead the passage of the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act and its 1988 follow-on, which cumulatively introduced mandatory sentences for drug possession. Biden later took pride in reminding audiences that “through the leadership of Senator Thurmond, and myself, and others,” Congress had passed a law mandating a five-year sentence, with no parole, for anyone caught with a piece of crack cocaine “no bigger than [a] quarter.” That is, they created the infamous disparity in penalties between those caught with powder cocaine (white people) and those carrying crack (black people). Biden also unblushingly cited his and Thurmond’s leading role in enacting laws allowing for the execution of drug dealers convicted of homicide, and expanding the practice of civil asset forfeiture, law enforcement’s plunder of property belonging to people suspected of crimes, even if they are neither charged nor convicted.

Despite pleas from the ­NAACP and the ­ACLU, the 1990s brought no relief from Biden’s crime crusade. He vied with the first Bush Administration to introduce ever more draconian laws, including one proposing to expand the number of offenses for which the death penalty would be permitted to fifty-one. Bill Clinton quickly became a reliable ally upon his 1992 election, and Biden encouraged him to “maintain crime as a Democratic initiative” with suitably tough legislation. The ensuing 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, passed with enthusiastic administration pressure, would consign millions of black Americans to a life behind bars.

In subsequent years, as his crime legislation, particularly on mandatory sentences, attracted efforts at reform, Biden began expressing a certain remorse. “I am part of the problem that I have been trying to solve since then, because I think the disparity [between crack and powder cocaine sentences] is way out of line,” he declared at a Senate hearing in 2008. However, there is little indication that his words were matched by actions, especially after he moved to the vice presidency the following year. The executive director of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, Eric Sterling, who worked on the original legislation in the House as a congressional counsel, told me, “During the eight years he was vice president, I never saw him take a leadership role in the area of drug policy, never saw him get out in front on the issue like he did on same-sex marriage, for example. Biden could have taken a stronger line [with Obama] privately or publicly, and he did not.”
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In the near term, it’s unlikely that there will be further bipartisan attempts to chip away at Biden’s legislative legacy, a legacy that includes an inconsistent (to put it mildly) record on abortion rights. Roe v. Wade “went too far,” he told an interviewer in 1974. “I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.” For some years his votes were consistent with that view. He supported the notorious Hyde Amendment prohibiting any and all federal funding for abortions, and fathered the “Biden Amendment” that banned the use of US foreign aid for abortion research.

As the 1980s wore on, however, and Biden’s presidential ambitions started to swell, he began to cast fewer antiabortion votes (with some exceptions),
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Biden’s record on race and women did him little damage with the voters of Delaware, who regularly returned him to the Senate with comfortable margins. On race, at least, Biden affected to believe that Delawareans’ views might be closer to those of his old buddy Thurmond than those of the “Northeast liberal” he sometimes claimed to be. “You don’t know my state,” he told Fox as he geared up for his first attempt on the White House in 2006. “My state was a slave state. My state is a border state. My state has the eighth-largest black population in the country. My state is anything [but] a Northeast liberal state.” Months later, in front of a largely Republican audience in South Carolina, he joked that the only reason Delaware had fought with the North in the Civil War was “because we couldn’t figure out how to get to the South. There were a couple of states in the way.”

Whether or not most Delawareans are proud of their slaveholding history, there are some causes that they, or at least the dominant power brokers in the state, hold especially dear. Foremost among them is Delaware’s status as a freewheeling tax haven. State laws have made Delaware the domicile of choice for corporations, especially banks, and it competes for business with more notorious entrepôts such as the Cayman Islands. Over half of all US public companies are legally headquartered there.

“It’s a corporate whore state, of course,” the anonymous former Biden staffer remarked to me offhandedly in a recent conversation. He stressed that in “a small state with thirty-five thousand bank employees, apart from all the lawyers and others from the financial industry,” Biden was never going to stray too far from the industry’s priorities. We were discussing bankruptcy, an issue that has highlighted Biden’s fealty to the banks. Unsurprisingly, Biden was long a willing foot soldier in the campaign to emasculate laws allowing debtors relief from loans they cannot repay. As far back as 1978, he helped negotiate a deal rolling back bankruptcy protections for graduates with federal student loans, and in 1984 worked to do the same for borrowers with loans for vocational schools. Even when the ostensible objective lay elsewhere, such as drug-related crime, Biden did not forget his banker friends. Thus the 1990 Crime Control Act, with Biden as chief sponsor, further limited debtors’ ability to take advantage of bankruptcy protections.

These initiatives, however, were only precursors to the finance lobby’s magnum opus: the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act. This carefully crafted flail of the poor made it almost impossible for borrowers to get traditional “clean slate” Chapter 7 bankruptcy, under which debt forgiveness enables people to rebuild their lives and businesses. Instead, the law subjected them to the far harsher provisions of Chapter 13, effectively turning borrowers into indentured servants of institutions like the credit card companies headquartered in Delaware. It made its way onto the statute books after a lopsided 74–25 vote (bipartisanship!), with Biden, naturally, voting in favor.

It was, in fact, the second version of the bill. An earlier iteration had passed Congress in 2000 with Biden’s support, but President Clinton refused to sign it at the urging of the first lady, who had been briefed on its iniquities by Elizabeth Warren. A Harvard Law School professor at the time, Warren witheringly summarized Biden’s advocacy of the earlier bill in a 2002 paper:

His energetic work on behalf of the credit card companies has earned him the affection of the banking industry and protected him from any well-funded challengers for his Senate seat.

Furthermore, she added tartly, “This important part of Senator Biden’s legislative work also appears to be missing from his Web site and publicity releases.” No doubt coincidentally, the credit card giant MBNA was Biden’s largest contributor for much of his Senate career, while also employing his son Hunter as an executive and, later, as a well-remunerated consultant.

It should go without saying, then, that Biden was among the ninety senators on one of the fatal (to the rest of us) legislative gifts presented to Wall Street back in the Clinton era: the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act of 1999. The act repealed the hallowed Depression-era Glass–Steagall legislation that severed investment banking from commercial banking, thereby permitting the combined operations to gamble with depositors’ money, and ultimately ushering in the 2008 crash. “The worst vote I ever cast in my entire time in the United States Senate,” admitted Biden in December 2016, as he prepared to leave office. Seventeen years too late, he explained that the act had “allowed banks with deposits to take on risky investments, putting the whole system at risk.”

In the meantime, of course, he had been vice president of the United States for eight years, and thus in a position to address the consequences of his (and his fellow senators’) actions by using his power to press for criminal investigations. His longtime faithful aide, Ted Kaufman, in fact, had taken over his Senate seat and was urging such probes. Yet there is not the slightest sign that Biden used his influence to encourage pursuit of the financial fraudsters. As he opined in a 2018 talk at the Brookings Institution, “I don’t think five hundred billionaires are the reason we’re in trouble. The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.” Characteristically, he described gross inequalities in wealth mainly as a threat to bipartisanship: “This gap is yawning, and it’s having the effect of pulling us apart. You see the politics of it.”
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Just read the whole thing. Fuck Joe Biden. It's telling that the Obama administration didn't say a word regarding his proposed run in 2016 and has yet to say a word regarding his potential run in 2020.
 
Strickland33 said:
No Joe! Joe Biden’s disastrous legislative legacy

a.k.a. why I won't be supporting Joe Biden







Just read the whole thing. Fuck Joe Biden. It's telling that the Obama administration didn't say a word regarding his proposed run in 2016 and has yet to say a word regarding his potential run in 2020.
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Didn't the Obama administration give Creepy Uncle Joe the highest medal of something or another?
 
Strickland33 said:
No Joe! Joe Biden’s disastrous legislative legacy

a.k.a. why I won't be supporting Joe Biden







Just read the whole thing. Fuck Joe Biden. It's telling that the Obama administration didn't say a word regarding his proposed run in 2016 and has yet to say a word regarding his potential run in 2020.
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Biden is idealogically a much worse candidate than Hillary ever thought about being. Biden's popularity is entirely based on his connection to Obama, and sympathy from the death of his son. Biden and the Pod Save America crew are probably the only people who have benefited politically from riding Obama's coattails.
 
Why do you hate Pod Save America?
 
I want him to say it and explain it though.
 
PhDeac said:
I want him to say it and explain it though.
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I've made probably thousands of posts on the tunnels generally describing why I detest Pod Save America and detached WASPy suburban elitist wonk liberalism. I'd prefer a root canal to having rich Harvard fratboys talk down to me about why radical social and political change isnt needed or possible.

All those lanyard wearing Brooks Brothers lacrosse douchebags were all just a stern lecture from their grandfather away from being Republicans. Fuck them and fuck their astroturf means testing corporate alternatives to actual change. "WE PRESENT TO YOU, MEDICARE EXTRA + SPONSORED BY VERIZON"
 
So you don’t listen to Pod Save America or do you just hate them because they’re rich white guys?
 
myDeaconmyhand said:
I've made probably thousands of posts on the tunnels generally describing why I detest Pod Save America and detached WASPy suburban elitist wonk liberalism. I'd prefer a root canal to having rich Harvard fratboys talk down to me about why radical social and political change isnt needed or possible.

All those lanyard wearing Brooks Brothers lacrosse douchebags were all just a stern lecture from their grandfather away from being Republicans. Fuck them and fuck their astroturf means testing corporate alternatives to actual change. "WE PRESENT TO YOU, MEDICARE EXTRA + SPONSORED BY VERIZON"
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So you’ve never listened to Pod Save America is what you’re saying. None of them went to Harvard and they are consistently supportive of most radical political and social changes the left is pushing for.
 
myDeaconmyhand said:
I've made probably thousands of posts on the tunnels generally describing why I detest Pod Save America and detached WASPy suburban elitist wonk liberalism. I'd prefer a root canal to having rich Harvard fratboys talk down to me about why radical social and political change isnt needed or possible.

All those lanyard wearing Brooks Brothers lacrosse douchebags were all just a stern lecture from their grandfather away from being Republicans. Fuck them and fuck their astroturf means testing corporate alternatives to actual change. "WE PRESENT TO YOU, MEDICARE EXTRA + SPONSORED BY VERIZON"
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Pretty good..reminded me of someone :) :p
 
RChildress107 said:
So you’ve never listened to Pod Save America is what you’re saying. None of them went to Harvard and they are consistently supportive of most radical political and social changes the left is pushing for.
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RChildress107 said:
And only one of them is a WASP
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We got a PSA fan here! Anyway, maybe they're Catholic or Jewish, same white country club POV. I'm well aware of the bullshit corporatist incrementalism they are selling you as "radical" and "progressive". I'm aware of United States of Health and Medicare Extra (for all!) Imagine teaming up with Bill Frist and calling your plan progressive. Beyond policy, PSA is trite as hell - whew, a group of beltway bros constantly flummoxed by Trump. Imagine if Boss Hogg had a podcast all about them rascally Duke boys. No thanks.
 
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So you haven’t listened to PSA. Just admit it.
 
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