The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
    jollyroger's picture

    Better board the bus for Bernie

    By jollyroger on Sun, 01/12/2020 - 11:07pm |

     

     

    Destination, "Furthur"

     

     

     

    The sad reality that is our Electoral College mandates a new version of "Clean for Gene"

     

    It seems clear that the fate of the nation (and the world) hangs in the dank cheese cellars of Wisconsin, the hillbilly sections of rural Pennsylvania and the vote-suppressing suburbs of Michigan.

     

    A flood of volunteers from out of state is called for.

     

    We need to register a few hundred thousand new voters, for the pitfalls of voter suppression and straightforward vote larceny to be overcome.

     

    Volunteers in Brooklyn are appreciated, but volunteers in Milwaukee are treasured.

    Comments

    Freedom Riders, but why Bernie?

    Too much, the Magic Bus.

    Still a Mystery Tour:

    Either on the bus or off it.

    (one parked himself in the Psych ward

    at UofM, presumably before going

    over the Cuckoo's nest,

    just expecting to fly.

    Ah, the 60's.

    If I had a hammer... I could drive your car...)

    PS - I know what it's like to be Fred


    by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 01/13/2020 - 7:30am

    It is hard to overestimate the role of the CIA (via MKUltra) in the penetration and subversion of conformist rationality by the forces of shamanic chaos.

     

    A bus we can ride with  pride!


    by jollyroger on Tue, 01/14/2020 - 4:53pm

    While they might like your bus, I really can't see the denizens of the cellar bars of West Allis, Waukesha and the north side of Milwaukee, Wisconsin thinking that well of Bernie bros.Them's the ones you'd have to win over and I just can't see them liking Bernie nor his bros. Uncle Joe is more like it, doesn't have that northeaster socialist vibe. (Klobacher or Mayor Peter could do what's needed if they wanted to.) Passionate Bernie fanboys and girls knocking on their door is not the answer, that's the opinion of this former Wisconsinite who just visited again recently. Much more likely it would backfire tremendously. I suppose Bernie bros could get a few more votes by venturing into workplaces that used to support unionization, but there are very few of those left.


    by artappraiser on Mon, 01/13/2020 - 1:56pm

    p.s. To try to get across why: the type you got to get, they would vote for Jesse Jackson, but not AOC.  That fervent angry passionate northeastern thing is a big big turnoff in Wisconsin, a roll-your-eyes type turnoff.


    by artappraiser on Mon, 01/13/2020 - 2:01pm

    She's  channeling Bronx Nice


    by jollyroger on Tue, 01/14/2020 - 4:47pm

    And Bernie channels Larry David trying to apoplectively live amongst the laid back in Manhattan Beach, CA in his show "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and SNL knows that and pushes the meme with Larry David his very self. It's the Larry David thing that Wisconsites don't like, that's it in a nutshell. It's not even funny to them, they don't get why a person would be like that.


    by artappraiser on Tue, 01/14/2020 - 7:37pm

    Bernie is having a difference of opinion with Elizabeth Warren.

    Warren confirms that Bernie told her that a woman could not win the presidency.

    Watched a disappointing discussion between Sanders supporter Cornel West and Angela Rye on CNN.

    West argued that Sanders' record documented his support for women candid ages.

    Neither, Rye or anchor Don Lemon mentioned problems Bernie has had with connecting to women

    Even for an older white man speaking at an event for women of color, the reception Bernie Sanders received at the recent She the People summit was chilly. Unlike the other 2020 candidates at the forum—including another white man—several of Sanders’ responses were met with groans. At one point, he answered a question about the recent increase in hate crimes by turning it back to a conversation on universal health care, drawing boos.

    The reaction to Sanders did not surprise women’s rights advocates. The senator has one of the strongest and longest records on reproductive rights and pay inequality of the 2020 contenders, but he’s often criticized for not taking leadership on or prioritizing these issues—and, more recently, for failing to learn from his past missteps.

    “You can put lipstick on the pig, but in the end the senator is someone who is actually very proud of not changing his ideas,” Sarah Slamen, a Texas organizer and Sanders’ 2016 state campaign coordinator in Louisiana, told The Daily Beast.

    “I want to believe that old dogs can learn new tricks, but I don’t see it with this dog,” she added.

    https://www.thedailybeast.com/bernie-sanders-has-a-blind-spot-on-womens-issues-ex-staffers-say

     

    Biden and Buttigieg are laughing on the way to the debate and Iowa. Klobuchar may get a bounce too.

    Edit to add:

    Note to self: Placing Klobuchar at the tail end fits into Bernie's alleged statement.

     

     


    by rmrd0000 on Mon, 01/13/2020 - 10:57pm

    Interesting stats, make of them what ye will (One opinion I don't need to hear because it's been repeated over and over at dagblog is that they are all racists):


    by artappraiser on Tue, 01/14/2020 - 4:08pm

    They are all willing to vote for a racist.


    by rmrd0000 on Tue, 01/14/2020 - 4:46pm

    here's some art for you:


    by artappraiser on Tue, 01/14/2020 - 6:38pm

    I Dunno.

     

    When Greta gets angry it seems to work.


    by jollyroger on Tue, 01/14/2020 - 8:15pm

    I'm not angry, I'm just being honest. I wish they were better people. I don't have to feel sad or trapped because they are who they are. I think it's best to work on Independent and wayward Democrats. 
    How is it that nothing is required of the people who are still ready to vote for Trump? Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X did not mince words.

    Ibram Kendi calls them out. Ta-Nehisi Coates calls them out. Roxane Gay calls them out. Joy Reid calls them out. Don Lemon calls them out. Al Sharpton calls them out. Even former RNC chair Michael Steele calls them out. But, in your bubble, you see me as the only one calling them out.


    by rmrd0000 on Tue, 01/14/2020 - 8:35pm

    You focus on the progress made since 1965. It is 2020, and we are still at a point where there are discussions about the continuing paucity of POC nominated for entertainment awards in the United States. We are still arguing about statues to men dedicated to the men who wanted to maintain their freedom while enslaving others. We have religious groups divided by the issue of race. For people born long past 1965, you realize that inequality persists in 2020. The justice system is rigged against you. A political party is conducting open political warfare against your community. You see these things and some people, who are supposed to be your allies, say stop whining.

    I'll stick with Kendi, Coates, Gay, etc. Heck, Cornel West calls them out. William Barber calls them out.............

    Not speaking truth to power is being complicit

     


    by rmrd0000 on Tue, 01/14/2020 - 8:59pm

    Jerry Saltz gets angry, he is not a both sides to blame idiot:

    "I’ll 100% vote for whoever Dem candidate is. But we should be hammering Trump, his corruption, his family’s corruption & graft. Insult him 24-hrs a day! Screw the small-ball. Is this an emergency or not! None of them is doing this. In your hearts you know I’m right. Hammer him."


    by NCD on Tue, 01/14/2020 - 9:35pm

    I don't see that post as about "both sides do it." And Trump and the presidential race wasn't mentioned.

    I know you like to play the "only two sides" politics game, NCD. And I don't resent people who chose to dive into that and play the game. I just don't see it as reality, in real life there are not just two sides. People are more complex than Democrat vs Republican. And then lets get back to politics: the number of registered Independents would argue that it's not actual reality in politics either. And when you go with a big wide national vote for the top office in the country, with a big turnout, reality is not Democrat vs. Republican either. Moreso it ends up a popularity contest between two people.


    by artappraiser on Tue, 01/14/2020 - 11:13pm

    In Presidential elections, the process is binary. A Republican will win, or a Democrat will win.

    Trump is a racist 

    0 = willing to vote for a racist

    1 = not willing to vote for a racist

    Staying home or voting third party = 0


    by rmrd0000 on Wed, 01/15/2020 - 12:09am

    Once again you're avoiding the issue that doesn't make the voters binary and this is why some Bernie votes in the primaries switched to Trump.  And the candidates have to win over swings and independents to win.

    And then throwing in your own special bete noire. News: there are many people who have little concern about race issues. To you, everything is about race and you show little interest in anything else. Others are similar with different issues, like abortion. You are a single issue litmus test voter.

    Basically: so rmrd thinks they are horrible people if they vote for someone who is racist. SO WHAT! What does that have to do with winning an election? You're not the god decider of what is the priority of every single voter. Are you like going to send them to hell, or what. News for you: there actually are registered Democrats that are racist. I know some personally. Racist people are allowed to vote, there is no test.


    by artappraiser on Wed, 01/15/2020 - 12:32am

    My approach to winning is to motivate Independents and Democrats who stayed at home to vote in 2020. Trump is the major reason that a person would not vote for Trump. Note the new release of documents from the House Intelligence Committee. The racist is being outed.

    I don't wish to send Trump voters to Hell. I want them to be better. In the meantime, I'm OK with outvoting those who would vote for the racist. Democrats won using this approach in 2018 and 2019. The discussions during the debates made clear that every candidate recognized the importance of courting the minority vote. People of good conscience realize that they cannot vote for Donald J Trump. If people do not care about racial inequality, we need to outvote them.

    Racists are obviously allowed to vote. They voted for Trump. Hillary got 3 million more votes than Trump. This time around, we have to make certain that turnout is increased in critical states while also increasing turnout everywhere. Focus on the rational voters. Fuck the racists. Fuck them figuratively, I can't send them to Hell. As I said my priority is to overwhelm them at the polls.

    The recent letter in support of a Christianity Today editor who criticized Trump is about addressing racism. We cannot pretend that race is not an issue. We still have black and brown children in concentration camps.

    You are in a bubble.


    by rmrd0000 on Wed, 01/15/2020 - 8:28am

    I just watched Bernie's closing statement in the debate and his two answers before that. He was doing his best impression yet of Larry David having a blood pressure attack. Just sayin'.

    But I admit it actually made me think of how Trump might make mincemeat of him by just lying and schmoozing while Bernie gets red in the face with anger about the lies.


    by artappraiser on Tue, 01/14/2020 - 11:03pm

    Here's a Bernie bot who brought back bad memories of Obamabots bashing Hillary as a bitch at TPMCafe. Just hit me: for the fanbots, their candidate is always a victim of other politicians that have evil hearts and are vicious and since their candidate is pure of heart, they need a protector:


    by artappraiser on Tue, 01/14/2020 - 11:41pm

    lots of supporters on Twitter are actually a big negative for his image, I often see people complain about them like this:

    I see this all the time. The tweet where someone endorses a candidate other than Bernie and then the follow-up tweet having to respond to all the abusive assholes jumping into their mentions. Almost like a pattern of assholery for several years now. pic.twitter.com/2AxHszXEym

    — Steven Santos (@stevensantos) January 15, 2020

    Obama could overcome that with his own personality. Bernie: not so much. MHO.


    by artappraiser on Wed, 01/15/2020 - 12:22am

    addresses Democratic party primary divisiveness problems quite well, methinks:


    by artappraiser on Wed, 01/15/2020 - 6:58pm

    Third Way peeps argue in WaPo op-ed that Bernie Sanders’s agenda makes him the definition of unelectable​

    By Jon Cowan and Jim Kessler  Jan. 15, 2020 at 2:16 p.m. EST

    Jon Cowan is president and Jim Kessler is executive vice president for policy at Third Way, a center-left think tank.

    In the lead-up to the Iowa caucuses, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is arguing that he is the Democratic candidate most likely to beat President Trump. He has touted his electability in speeches and interviews and on social media, and his campaign has said it welcomes a debate on electability.

    We should have that debate, because the fact is that the United States has never elected anyone as president who is as far left as Sanders. The only modern Democratic nominees approaching Sanders’s ideological views were former vice president Walter Mondale in 1984 and then-Sen. George McGovern in 1972. Together, they won a scant 30 electoral college votes and lost the popular vote by a combined 35 million votes. Mondale’s wipe-out was the biggest electoral college loss in U.S. history.

    For those who say these landslide races were ages ago, and that Donald Trump is no Ronald Reagan, fair enough. How about December 2019? That is when Sanders clone Jeremy Corbyn got routed by Trump clone Boris Johnson in the British parliamentary elections, sending the Labour Party to what some said was its worst defeat in more than 80 years. Corbyn, who Sanders predicted would lead his party to a resounding victory and “should be a lesson for the Democratic Party,” tanked. He “literally repelled voters,” former Labour MP David Milliband wrote after the debacle.

    For Sanders to have a chance of winning, let alone proving to be the most electable as he claims, Americans would suddenly have to become comfortable with socialism. That would be quite a change, since, as of three months ago, socialism was viewed negatively in the United States by a 13-percentage-point margin (55 percent negative, 42 percent positive), according to the Pew Research Center.

    Sanders’s team says that no matter who is nominated, Republicans will smear that Democrat with the “socialism” label. That’s whistling past the graveyard. Democrats have easily batted this spurious charge aside, because they ran on a mainstream progressive agenda. Sanders won’t and can’t. He has embraced the socialist label his entire political life, and his agenda, as he likes to point out, is far beyond anything Democrats have proposed on the national stage [....]

    FWIW, I only noticed it because it's currently the #2 most read op-ed over there right now, after Impeachment descends into darkness by Dana Milbank. And WaPo readers are not Fox viewers, as it is famously part of "the liberal media".


    by artappraiser on Thu, 01/16/2020 - 1:27am

    and then there's the neo-liberal econ guys who don't think much of his protectionism:


    by artappraiser on Thu, 01/16/2020 - 1:36am

    In pictures


    by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 01/16/2020 - 3:04am

     

    Serendipitously, I have been solicited by Sunrise Extinction to chip in for buses, the kids, tney say, are standing by..

     

    We’re just 21 days out from the Iowa Caucuses and 29 days from the New Hampshire primary. What happens in these early votes will set the tone for the whole election. If we seize this moment, we can start this year off with a major win for our movement.

    Sunrise endorsed Bernie Sanders last week because he’s shown time and time again that he’s ready to fight for our generation and the Green New Deal. Now, our teams in Iowa and New Hampshire are putting all their energy into turning out young people for Bernie.

    We have hundreds of young people who are ready to go to Iowa and NH and put Bernie over the top but we need to raise money to house, train and outfit them with materials.

    We need to raise $20,000 more in the next 10 days to pull this off with enough time for people to plan their travel. Can you chip in today?

     

    .


    by jollyroger on Thu, 01/16/2020 - 9:27pm

    Bernie will be a punching bag

    Bernie Sanders, a top competitor in the Democratic primaries, has attacked Joe Biden for bringing “just a lot of baggage” into the race. But if past views are a major consideration, consider the baggage that Sanders drags into the campaign.

    Go back over 40 years, to the start of Iran’s long conflict with the United States. On April 1, 1979, the theocratic Islamic Republic of Iran was proclaimed. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who had returned to Iran from exile to assume command of the revolt, became Supreme Leader in December of that year. His rise was accelerated by the seizure on Nov. 4 of 52 American diplomats and citizens, and citizens of other countries, at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. The hostage crisis became the means by which the Ayatollah crushed political opponents in Iran. Dealing with the hostage taking became the overwhelming political crisis for President Jimmy Carter. It lasted 444 days. 

    Virtually all Americans—Democrats, Republicans and independents—united in support of the hostages and the international call for their freedom. One prominent political figure on the 2020 stage, then almost completely unknown, stood apart by joining a Marxist-Leninist party that not only pledged support for the Iranian theocracy, but also justified the hostage taking by insisting the hostages were all likely CIA agents. Who was that person? It was Bernie Sanders.  

    Sanders would like the public to believe, as an AP story put it, that “democratic socialism [is] the economic philosophy that has guided his political career.” But that has not always been the case. In 1977, he left the tiny left-wing Liberty Union Party of Vermont that he’d co-founded, and in 1980 instead aligned himself with the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the self-proclaimed Trotskyist revolutionary party, became its presidential elector in Vermont, and campaigned for its candidates and platform that defended the Iranian hostage seizure.  

    In fact, the SWP’s position on Iran is part of what distinguishes it from democratic socialist groups. When its presidential candidate, Andrew Pulley, came to speak at the University of Vermont in October 1980, Sanders chaired the meeting. Pulley attracted only 40 students to his rally, where he concentrated, according to the SWP’s newspaper The Militant, “on the Iran-Iraq war,” and condemned “anti-Iranian hysteria around the U.S. hostages.” Military action against Iran was not at that point theoretical—Pulley’s speech came six months after the attempt to free the hostages in Operation Eagle Claw had failed.

    https://www.thedailybeast.com/when-iran-took-americans-hostage-bernie-backed-irans-defenders

     

     


    by rmrd0000 on Thu, 01/16/2020 - 10:00pm

    Point taken, anent which my most recent thoughts may be found in my next post.

     

    That said, I would respectfully adduce the following:

     

    The opinion of the writer, (who works for Herman Kahn's outfit)  is long on guilty associations but short on direct Sanders' quotes. 

     

    Also, the guy is old line CP who seems to have gone over the falls with the other reformed reds now neo cons, though I say that unencumbered by any more extensive research that the first page of google. so it's just a first impression.


    by jollyroger on Sun, 01/19/2020 - 8:29pm

    Await your post. Right now it looks like Biden will have to collapse in IA, NH, and NV for Biden to be viable in SC.


    by rmrd0000 on Sun, 01/19/2020 - 8:26pm

    http://dagblog.com/reader-blogs/plan-b-bloomberb-biden-30070


    by jollyroger on Sun, 01/19/2020 - 9:26pm

    I think you are probably correct, and I wish Biden were his 10 year younger self who wailed on Paul Ryan.  The 2020 model has leaky valves and bent pushrods.


    by jollyroger on Sun, 01/19/2020 - 9:29pm

    some stereotyping @ McSweeneys along the lines of your psychedelic bus but much fancier and more au courant:

    FEBRUARY 6, 2020: TO ALL THE BERNIE BROS I’VE LOVED BEFORE


    by artappraiser on Sun, 02/16/2020 - 7:36pm