a future to believe in

William Murderface wrote:

Videh sinoc, razvalila ga je. On ne ume uopste da se snadje.

William Murderface wrote:da sam pozeleo da se u nekom trenutku pojavi Selina Majer i podvikne "Man up!".

Former Vice President Joe Biden told a roomful of well-heeled donors on Tuesday night that he would not “demonize” the rich if he’s elected president in the 2020 election. “I need you very badly,” he told the group.

Addressing the 100 or so guests at a fundraiser at the swanky Carlyle Hotel in New York City, Biden said he’d gotten into hot soup with “some of the people on my team, on the Democratic side” for his earlier comments about rich people being “just as patriotic as poor people.”

That’s “not a joke,” he said. “I mean, we may not want to demonize anybody who has made money.” 
Appearing to suggest that his tax plan would not include excessive taxes on the rich, Biden said “no one’s standard of living change” if he’s elected.
 
“The truth of the matter is, you all, you all know, you all know in your gut what has to be done. We can disagree in the margins but the truth of the matter is it’s all within our wheelhouse and nobody has to be punished. No one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change,” he said. 

Biden added that though income inequality is a considerable problem that plagues the United States, the rich are not the enemy that’s to blame for the wealth gap. He said:

When we have income inequality as large as we have in the United States today, it brews and ferments political discord and basic revolution. Not a joke. Not a joke ... It allows demagogues to step in and say the reason where we are is because of the ‘other’ ... You’re not the other. I need you very badly. I hope if I win this nomination, I won’t let you down. I promise you. I have a bad reputation, I always say what I mean. The problem is I sometimes say all that I mean.

Bloomberg’s Jennifer Epstein described the scene at the Tuesday fundraiser: Affluent donors, including former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and former Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman, tucked into hors d’oeuvres like lobster, chicken satay and crudites. The group was “well-dressed,” Epstein said, most of them in suits. 

Though Biden has pushed a generally populist economic agenda focused on decreasing income inequality and promoting workers’ rights, the former vice president has taken a moderate stance when it comes to taxation. Unlike some of his 2020 Democratic rivals like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Biden has not singled out the mega-rich as tax targets. He’s instead proposed expanding tax credits for the poor and middle class, and making the tax code less friendly to rich investors.

“I love Bernie, but I’m not Bernie Sanders. I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason why we’re in trouble,” Biden said at an event in March.

Gargamel wrote:

ali ja još ne videh levičarski ili socijalistički argument koji deluje iole smisleno, a koji bi se bavio tim problemom (od Sandersa ili od koga drugog). mislim... šta je rešenje, ukinuti avionski prevoz, prestati sa uzgojem krava, zabraniti automobile, prestati sa proizvodnjom cementa? pride je argument kontra rasta i potrošnje u principu argument da bi Afrikanci valjalo da ostanu siromašni.

Pretty awful that the right would make a joke of visiting a child CBP camp - but fitting, given that they don’t seem to care one shred about other people’s lives.

PS That watch belonged to my dad. It was the last & only possession he left me. I wear it to mark important moments. https://t.co/b6oXiWUaPj

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 29, 2019

Who won the Democratic debates? Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren – and Trump
Cas Mudde

Democrats’ fragmentation, support for undocumented immigrants, and silence on issues affecting the heartland leaves a big opening for Trump

@casmudde
Sat 29 Jun 2019 11.00 BST

After two nights, and four hours, of Democratic debates, it is now up to the pundits and spin doctors to convince Americans – the majority of whom did not watch the debates – which candidates won or lost.

Clearly, this was not your parents’ Democratic party. The stars of both debates were largely “non-traditional” candidates – women and ethnic and sexual minorities. The first debate was won by Elizabeth Warren, who combined facts with passion. There were also breakout performances by Julián Castro and Cory Booker. The second debate was won, hands down, by Kamala Harris, with strong performances by Pete Buttigieg and Kirsten Gillibrand. We also saw (older) white men boast about their parenting, and a non-white woman and a gay man leverage their military experience.

Still, there was some traditional gendered behavior too. There was a lot of interrupting and shouting over each other – predominantly, but not exclusively, by older white men. More than half an hour of the combined four hours of debate was wasted on mediocre white guys who poll less than one percent, and I’m not even counting the time wasted by moderator Chuck Todd pontificating rather than asking questions.

The clear losers on stage were “traditional” candidates – white men again – most notably Beto O’Rourke and Joe Biden. The main loser off stage was NBC News – not just for an embarrassing technical glitch with the microphones in the first debate, but also for the format of the debates. Together with the Democratic National Committee, NBC decided to invite far too many candidates and divide them by lot rather than support in the polls.

This mainly hurt Warren, who ended up in Wednesday’s second-tier debate, in which the candidates represented less than 25% of the Democratic vote in current polls (most of that support is for Warren). This denied her the opportunity to face her key opponents, Biden and Sanders, head-on.

That said, the large field also had some positive side-effects. It provided comic relief (Marianne Williamson), put climate change front and center in the first debate (Jay Inslee), and, thanks to Eric Swalwell, introduced the slogan – “pass the torch” - that will haunt Biden throughout the campaign.

Moreover, somewhat paradoxically, having 20 candidates made the Democratic party look less divided than the three (really two) candidates in 2016. Rather than being ideologically divided, let alone polarized, the Democratic party today is fragmented – devoid of a clear leader.

Partly for that reason, there was another unofficial, offstage winner: the Republican party, and Trump in particular. The debates saw Trump’s main challengers falter (Biden) or fade (Sanders), the second-tier perform strongly (Warren, Harris, Buttigieg), and some new challengers emerge (notably Castro and Booker). This increases the chances for a long, internally divisive, Democratic primary – allowing the Republican party to look stable and united in contrast as well as benefit from free opposition research as the Democratic candidates try to tear each other down.

The debates also gave disproportionate attention to the plight of non-Americans, notably asylum seekers at the southern border and undocumented immigrants throughout the country. While this is understandable and even morally admirable, given the Trump administration’s inhumane immigration policies and the salience of the issue at this moment, it provides an easy opening for Republicans.

This was only made worse by the moderators’ fondness for stupid “raise your hand” polls, like the one which asked candidates to raise their hands if their preferred healthcare system would cover undocumented immigrants. All did, and within seconds the internet exploded with rightwing pundits claiming that this proved Democrats care more about “aliens” than Americans. One of the people to weigh in, of course, was President Trump, who breezily tweeted: “All Democrats just raised their hands for giving millions of illegal aliens unlimited healthcare. How about taking care of American Citizens first!? That’s the end of that race!”

The other reason Republicans are probably pleased with the Democratic debates is that, except for healthcare, very few topics were seriously discussed that could challenge Republicans in the heartland or mobilize Democratic voters outside of the traditional progressive base. The debate barely touched on the opioid crisis, for example, and the issue was largely reduced to punishment of big pharma rather than discussion of how to help addicts and their families. It is depressing to see the Democratic party once again ignoring this clearly progressive issue, which affects almost half of all Americans in a personal way.

There was also no serious discussion of America’s crumbling infrastructure - a particularly ripe issue for big-government Democrats like Sanders and a huge missed opportunity, given that it is an election promise on which Trump has clearly failed to deliver. More generally, neither moderators nor candidates really addressed the broader issue of work, from the threat of automation (only Andrew Yang) through the highly salient issue of minimum wage to the explosion of the precariat in the wake of the Great Recession.

Finally, with the exception of Ohio congressman Tim Ryan’s pseudo-populist appeal to Trump voters in the rust belt, there was no discussion of the ever-growing urban-rural divide and the plight of rural America. Republicans will undoubtedly exploit this by continuing to accuse the Democrats of being the party of coastal elites and minorities, while presenting themselves as the voice of the implicitly white “real America”.

If the Democrats want to defeat Trump in 2020, they need to expand beyond relatively narrow progressive causes and start planning their messaging for the general election. Nothing less than the White House is at stake.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/29/democratic-debate-kamala-harris-elizabeth-warren-trump

ontheotherhand wrote:Ti tu ništa ne bi dir'o dakle.

Good news: @NateSilver538’s own post-debate poll shows that @BernieSanders now has the highest favorability ratings of all the 2020 Democratic candidates. https://t.co/KYVcQYZDKV pic.twitter.com/0XskfBeWqH

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) June 29, 2019

Gargamel wrote:

ontheotherhand wrote:Ti tu ništa ne bi dir'o dakle.

To što bih ja dirao mora imati barem minimalne šanse za uspeh. Varijante sa nekakvim ograničavanjem ili zaustavljanjem rasta i sveopštim odricanjem nemaju nikakvu šansu, pa se ne vredi baviti time.