dagblog - Comments for "What the CWA and DFA Endorsements Mean"

If you believe that Hillary

HSG — Sun, 20 Dec 2015 00:09:23 +0000

In reply to Sure, Hal - that's liberal

If you believe that Hillary Clinton's record is on balance pretty darn good and reflects a genuine concern for the well-being of poor, working, and middle-income Americans, you may believe that my words have been toxic. If you look at her record and see a triangulator, a corporatist, a militarist, and a phony, you wouldn't.

Sure, Hal - that's liberal

PeraclesPlease — Sat, 19 Dec 2015 15:47:31 +0000

In reply to One person's toxin is another

Sure, Hal - that's liberal Tea Party talk - anything goes as some version of the truth, the nastier and more detached from any subjective reality, the better. Enjoy your miniverse.

One person's toxin is another

HSG — Sat, 19 Dec 2015 13:23:34 +0000

In reply to Really, Hal, that is MILD

One person's toxin is another's truth.

Polls = opinion of the people

PeraclesPlease — Sat, 19 Dec 2015 12:52:17 +0000

In reply to We've been through this a

Polls = opinion of the people, Hal. Would you rather have a strongman that goes his own way, no matter how unpopular? Of course there's a balance, but you're not addressing that. The free trade deal, Hillary was "wait and see" until it was completed - something that made sense, no?

Glass-Steagal support is good if you conclude that it's the end-all and be-all to finance oversight. Not everyone agrees it's the only or the best approach. You've taken a specific need - fair & effective financial oversight - and turned it into a specific "my way or the highway" remedy - Glass-Steagal or bust. Similar to what the nurses union did with Universal Health Care - 1 solution, perhaps the best in an ideal world, but the US is far from an ideal world.

At the same time, her work on poverty, healthcare including SCHIP, women's rights, etc. should fall into the category of "friend to working people", no? I don't think SCHIP and rural electrification are big on Wall Street's list. You keep popping out with these grand proclamations of how horrible and anti-the-little-people, and when I call you on it, you try to tap it down with a bit of "she's done a few good things" which you then immediately dismiss a sentence later with "she simply is not a friend...". Go for your hate, buddy - you've got Hillary goggles bigger than her glasses of yore. A lot of folks seem to think she's a friend, including many in unions where she's gotten endorsements - not just top-down, as the Bernie followers pretend, but much more serious support throughout. For some reason you didn't respond to all my work digging out how the National Nurses Union did the same kind of limited non-transparent "survey" of carefully cherry-picked issues that you regularly blast Hillary's union supporters for doing.

And cozying up to big donors is required - you want to take on the Soviet Union with a slingshot, the GOP's billionaires with a few $100 donors? This is the kind of fluff I just laugh at, makes me think Sanders' fans aren't serious at all or somehow have been asleep the last 15 years. I can't wait for the Jan 15 campaign donations filing to see how this all works out.

Again, you're being silly.

PeraclesPlease — Sat, 19 Dec 2015 08:03:29 +0000

In reply to Neither the Berniebots nor

Again, you're being silly.

Hillary supporters by and large get Bernie, and if we didn't live in a time when driving the government into a wall to shut it down once a year wasn't the norm, we could get behind more leftist goals.

I'd like Universal Healthcare - but we got Obamacare, and the best we're going to do anytime soon is to protect it and Ming-willing make incremental improvements.

Getting corporates to pay more of their share is a hugely needed goal - but they've made such an art of buying politicians and rigging the tax system and finding their offshore tax havens that it will take a near-miracle to goad the system into making them pay a *tiny* bit more. An across the board Wall Street surcharge will be seen by the whiners as an attack on Capitalism, and if it ever comes close, we'll see a marketing shove that makes the Tea Party bit look mild.

I doubt there's a person on this blog that doesn't criticize Hillary's foreign policy and reliance on military intervention over more clever foreign policy.

But to be fair to her, she's seen a) how the American public, including the left, don't do subtlety, so she has Bush's war wrapped around her neck for a single pre-inspection vote more than Bush does, and b) her message in 2008 was much more pragmatic, but she lost to the purists who insisted Obama would bring some new way and instead he's continued Bush's roadmap pretty exactly - so being intelligent, she must realize the American public must be a bit stupid, and gives stupid people what they want. That's Democracy, the ugly side.

On the other hand, you simply ignore any of her long history of liberal activism - you somehow can't see any single detail that would make her attractive to supporting nurses' interest, can't see where she could compete with Bernie on poverty, even give Bernie better points on healthcare when she used up much of her political capital trying to get in nationwide healthcare *even with Democrats opposing her*.

Bernie does come from a liberal college town of 40,000 in a liberal state of only 600,000 - 98.6% white in 1990, 95.3% white in 2010. It is not strange to believe that policy positions that have sustained Bernie in Burlington won't fly at all for the mass of meat-eating, redneck, self-absorbed "exceptionalist" and largely evangelistic Americans nationwide, or the large black and larger Hispanic minorities. Politics is sausage, and Bernie has grown up in a candy factory. People are well-behaved in Burlington & Vermont. They aren't most everywhere else.

I have trouble believing that Bernie can sustain those values and the total effective suite of policies across the government as the executive branch, to carry out the implementation of those ideas in this poisoned stacked atmosphere. To quote Bill from 8 years ago, I think it's another "Fairy Tale". I had hoped, and said so here, that by now we'd have a new crew of fresh faces, that the farm club would have hatched a whole new breed of millenial favorites - but we haven't. Obama helped kill that farm club, as did the GOP success at the state level, so we're stuck with a pretty pathetic slate of options - and I don't see a 74-year-old guy from a liberal state with a good heart and a pretty decent track record as still being able to drive our crappy car out of the ditch, what with the pile of rubbernecks and assholes crowded around hooting at the car and trying to make sure it doesn't even start. Bernie's more fit for a crowd that actually wants to help, and there aren't that many.

As for women-hating, I don't attribute that to most Bernie supporters, but I do find some comments in this blog rather clueless and out-of-touch. Maybe chalk that up to the campaign and candidate distortion syndrome, Idunno.