Attorney in Texas
Attorney in Texas's Journal
Trump and Hillary would both shift to the center in the general election if they are nominated by
their respective parties (both are more flexible in their political values than in their devotion to self).
If Hillary zooms right and Trump drifts left, on which issues would Trump actually campaign to the left of Hillary in the general election if they are their parties' nominees?
I suspect that Trump would campaign to Hillary's left on
(1) job exporting trade deals,
(2) spending capital on overseas military bases,
(3) foreign nation building, and
(4) campaign finance regulation.
What other issues would Trump campaign on offering positions to the left of Hillary?
More people think Bernie Sanders has these key leadership traits than any top candidate
Source: Washington Post
New research from Gallup, released Friday, asked 7,500 members of the public to rate Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz on their perceptions of 12 leadership traits for each candidate. Though Gallup tweaked the wording slightly, they are the same dozen attributes the research and consulting firm has found to most predict leadership success in the more than 200 organizations it has studied.... As one might guess, Donald Trump does particularly well on being competitive (84 percent of respondents gave him a "4" or "5" rating on a 1 to 5 scale), and two to three times more respondents said Bernie Sanders cares about individuals than they did about the other candidates. Also unsurprising: Because Gallup was asking about political candidates, about whom people tend to have strong and bifurcated opinions, most of the candidates don't score above 60 percent on a majority of the traits. .... One candidate did stand out: Average the percentage of respondents who gave the candidate a "4" or a "5" on the four key traits outlined above, and Sanders comes out far and above the other candidates, with an average of 54 percent. Clinton and Trump, meanwhile, tie with an average of 29 percent across the ratings for these four attributes, and Cruz comes in last with an average of 25 percent.
...Clinton gets better ratings than any candidate on being prepared and analytical,the Gallup report states, which contributes to a public image that "is clearly on the hardworking, 'wonkish' side of the ledger.' She ties with Cruz, meanwhile, as the lowest on being visionary.
Sanders' image is most distinctive from the others, winning on more of the traits than any other candidate, particularly when it comes to being consistent or caring about individuals, winning on the " 'softer' dimensions of leadership," the Gallup report notes. Trump, meanwhile, sees ratings at the extremes, earning both the lowest marks of any candidate for any trait (caring about individuals, for which just 19 percent of respondents score him well) and the highest of any candidate for any trait (competitiveness, for which he gets an 84 percent rating).
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2016/05/02/more-people-think-bernie-sanders-has-these-key-leadership-traits-than-any-top-candidate/
"Sanders laughs with supporter who tells billionaire class to 'f--- off'"
Sanders laughs with supporter who tells billionaire class to 'f--- off'; excerpt:
Bernie Sanders shared an appreciation for the blunt language of his supporters Monday, even as he remarked that he could not be so vulgar himself.
“I think that when the top one-tenth of 1 percent — one-tenth of 1 percent — now owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent, we got some other choices that we can make,” Sanders said at a rally in Evansville, Indiana, repeating a common refrain on the trail.
As Sanders then said, “That choice is to tell the billionaire class — ” a man in the audience could be heard shouting, “To f--- off!”
Sanders briefly continued before pausing and chuckling.
“Well, that is one way to phrase it,” he said, gesturing at the interrupter. “See, I myself am constrained. I can’t quite phrase it like that, but that’s not bad.”... The crowd cheered, as Sanders let out another laugh before continuing with his speech.
"How Hillary Could Win the Election—and Lose the Country | She’d be a status-quo president at a time
...Clinton lacks a big, new animating idea in a year when voters in both parties are so discontented they have embraced some pretty bad ones. Like them or loathe them, Donald Trump's and Bernie Sanders’ messages are crystal clear and call for dramatic change, while Clinton’s remains spread softly all over the map. And her agenda promises less change than continuation—of the centrist Democratic Party policies that her husband pursued and which Barack Obama has largely followed. It’s no surprise that one of Clinton’s biggest campaign themes is to praise both her predecessor Democratic presidents—the one she married and the one she went to work for—effusively.... so many voters in the opposition party—and her own—will be nursing bitter disappointments from Day One. She’s already in danger of pre-alienating the Democratic base, with many Sanders supporters vowing never to support her.... Clinton contends that Trump’s and Sanders’ various protectionist prescriptions for rescuing the middle class range from unrealistic to unAmerican. But she has not made a compelling case for how she herself would address the dislocations and anxiety that are partially the byproduct of the economic globalization that Bill Clinton and Obama both embraced wholeheartedly.
“It is a real challenge, particularly on the economy,” says veteran Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. “In many places, her more pragmatic approach is very appealing, especially on national security and homeland security, where new ideas can be very dangerous. But on the economy, people—particularly blue-collar workers of all races—are looking for a more fundamental change. She’s going to have to articulate a bigger economic policy.”....“Her commanding rationale is what it’s always been: ‘It’s my time and the country is ready for a female president, and it ought to be me,’” Conway says. “And a combination of running for Bill Clinton and Barack Obama’s third terms. That in itself gives you a messaging headache, because those were two different presidencies and two different Democratic parties, but she can’t afford to alienate either one, because both of those presidencies were beloved by the Democratic base and acceptable to general election voters.”
Running to fill the third term that Ronald Reagan was barred from seeking was enough to elect George H.W. Bush in 1988, but not enough to sustain him when his lack of the “vision thing” left him vulnerable to Bill Clinton four years later. Hillary Clinton now faces a similar challenge.... True, she has the worst unfavorable ratings of any would-be Democratic nominee in modern times, hovering steadily around 55 percent.... But it is entirely possible to be the winner and still not get much of a mandate—to enter office as a kind of default president who gets in because no other candidate is electable but who doesn’t have the faith and loyalty of a large portion of the nation. Clinton is selling “realism” to a electorate that is, judging from the polls, deeply unhappy with its current reality. Her steady-as-she-goes brand of politics, and her “one from column A and two from column B” ideas are out of sync with the mood of the electorate in this three-sheets-to-the-wind age. To invert the columnist Murray Kempton’s famous maxim about Mayor John Lindsay of New York, she is tired and everyone else is fresh.... But a president’s greatest power is persuasion—and successful persuasion first requires an inspirational vision. John Kennedy pledged to “begin anew,” saying “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans” of which he was the exemplar. Ronald Reagan declared it was “morning in America” after the twilight years of the 1970s, a period of big government spending, stagflation and a draining hostage crisis, saying, “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Bill Clinton vowed to embrace “change versus more of the same.” Barack Obama promised “change we can believe in,” and pledged to create an army of devotees to carry it out.
Nothing in what pollster Conway calls Clinton’s “knitting together of scattershot sound-bites” comes close to distilling her worldview so succinctly. Indeed, in her victory speech in Brooklyn, she even resorted to borrowing one of her husband’s less than compelling generalities, “There’s nothing wrong with America that can’t be cured by what’s right with America.” ... “There is something going on out there, and nobody’s quite sure what it is, and what a principled leader can do about it,” says Jeff Shesol, who was a White House speechwriter for Bill Clinton.... Sanders’ liberal insurgency—and Trump’s nativist challenge from the right—have posed challenges for Clinton because at a time when two-thirds of voters are dissatisfied with the economy, both candidates have “an economic narrative,” as Celinda Lake puts it. “They have an origins story. They tell us how we got here, and who’s to blame—in Sanders’ case, Wall Street; in Trump’s, immigrants. If you can’t tell us how we got here, and who the villains are, how are we going to get out of it?”... There is also every reason to expect a President Hillary Clinton would face intransigence from congressional Republicans equal to or greater than that Obama has faced since taking office, especially if they were licking their wounds in the aftermath of a massive Trump defeat. She would be all but guaranteed to face a bruising Supreme Court confirmation battle right out of the box—whether over Obama’s centrist nominee Merrick Garland or a more reliably liberal choice her supporters might impel her to nominate. And she would face the wrath of the dead-end supporters of Sanders and Elizabeth Warren who would see her as selling out Democratic values.... Democratic media strategist Steve McMahon says Clinton’s campaign contention that she’s a pragmatist who can get things done “is not a very powerful message in the Democratic primary. Democrats are ideologues.” ... Yet there is a reason Clinton has twice struggled to win her own party’s nomination, first against a charismatic young African-American who promised a historic breakthrough that she herself could have bid fair to match, and now against a rumpled septuagenarian who has emerged as the unlikely avatar of the millennial generation. ... At the heart of the problem is her enduring difficulty in explaining—clearly and cleanly—what she actually aspires to do as president. And that’s a problem that seems likely to get worse before it gets better.
If Democrats vote for Democrats down ballot, who cares about their presidential vote in 45 states?
I have never failed to vote for the Democratic presidential nominee (even though I have been a Ralph Nader fan since I was in high school and Gore's choice of Lieberman was as close to a deal-breaker as I could imagine).
If we nominate Hillary, I'll likely vote for her (while I throw up in my mouth a little), but why should it matter?
The truth is, my presidential vote in Texas will not matter because Texas is not a battleground state.
No matter who we nominate (so long as the FBI does not derail our nominee), the Democratic presidential nominee win California, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, Maine, Oregon, Washington, Michigan, New Mexico, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Colorado, Wisconsin, and Iowa.
No matter who the Republicans nominate (so long as there is not such a landslide that makes any quibbling about any individual vote immaterial), they are going to win North Carolina, Montana, Georgia, Missouri, Arizona, Indiana, South Carolina, Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
If Democrats pinch their noses in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Nevada, Ohio, and Florida, then why shouldn't the rest of us Democrats simply focus on down-ballot Democratic candidates and vote our conscience at the top of the ticket?
Even if you expand the battleground to include North Carolina, Colorado, Wisconsin, and Iowa, that's still 41 states plus DC where our presidential vote won't change the outcome.
If I were to break with my life-long voting record and vote as a "down-ballot Democrat," what is the harm in that so long as I don't advocate similar clean-conscience voting in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Nevada, Ohio, and Florida?
Billionaires for a continuation of the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama-Clinton plutocracy of the 1%!
IN LIGHT OF THIS:
?
CAN WE REALLY ACT SURPRISED BY THIS?
Joe Biden praises Bernie Sanders for 'thinking big'
Source: CNN
Washington (CNN)Vice President Joe Biden has not endorsed a candidate in the 2016 race, but he recently praised Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders for thinking big when it comes to how to lead the country.
"I like the idea of saying, 'We can do much more,' because we can," Biden told The New York Times in an interview published Thursday... "I don't think any Democrat's ever won saying, 'We can't think that big — we ought to really downsize here because it's not realistic,'" Biden said. "C'mon man, this is the Democratic Party! I'm not part of the party that says, 'Well, we can't do it.'"... "Presidents have always been told by really smart people: 'Don't push something that you can't succeed in — it diminishes your power,'" he said. "I completely disagree with that proposition."
"Everything I've ever cared about — with the exception of the President's brilliant passage of the Affordable Care Act — takes time," he added. "The only way to get these big things done is talk about them."
It's not the first time Biden has made comments interpreted as boosting Sanders. During a CNN interview with Gloria Borger in January, Biden praised Sanders' fight on income inequality and said Clinton was "relatively new" to the effort.
Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/22/politics/joe-biden-bernie-sanders/
A New Policy Disagreement Between Clinton and Sanders: Soda Taxes
Source: New York Times
A tax on sugary soft drinks, like the one proposed in Philadelphia and endorsed by Mrs. Clinton this week, divides the left. It can be seen as achieving an admirable public health goal of less sugar consumption or as a very regressive tax that falls more on the poor than the rich, since the poor tend to drink more soda.... This week, Mrs. Clinton became the first presidential candidate to explicitly endorse a tax on sugary drinks. ... “It starts early with working with families, working with kids, building up community resources,” Mrs. Clinton said, according to a CNN report. “I’m very supportive of the mayor’s proposal to tax soda to get universal preschool for kids. I mean, we need universal preschool. And if that’s a way to do it, that’s how we should do it.”
...
But there’s another way to view soda taxes: as measures that hit the poor harder. Lower-income Philadelphians, like other lower-income Americans, tend to drink more soda than their richer neighbors. ... “Making sure that every family has high-quality, affordable preschool and child care is a vision that I strongly share,” Mr. Sanders said, in a written statement. “On the other hand, I do not support paying for this proposal through a regressive tax on soda that will significantly increase taxes on low-income and middle-class Americans. At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, it should be the people on top who see an increase in their taxes, not low-income and working people.”... Mr. Sanders also says Mrs. Clinton’s support violates her pledge not to raise taxes on those earning less than $250,000.
Mr. Sanders’s argument is in line with many soda tax opponents. And there’s most likely some truth to it. Tobacco taxes, in many ways the model for soda taxes, have tended to fall largely on low-income people, who remain more likely to smoke.... In Mexico, where a big, national soda tax went into effect in 2014, soda drinking declined the fastest among the poor, who felt the tax’s effects in their budgets most acutely. Consumption among the poorest Mexicans fell by 17 percent by the end of the year, compared with 12 percent in the population nationwide. As Barry Popkin, a professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina puts it: The rich paid the tax, and the poor reduced their soda drinking. If something like that happens in Philadelphia, the poor may suffer in the form of less choice or enjoyment, but they may not bear the brunt of funding city preschool.
Republicans appear to be nearly united in their opposition to the measure, both as a tax increase and a “nanny state” intrusion on personal choice. That is not true of conservatives the world over, though. In Britain, the Conservative government just proposed a hefty soda tax, which is expected to become law.
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/23/upshot/a-new-policy-disagreement-between-clinton-and-sanders-soda-taxes.html
Nice to see a news article focusing on the current platform issues as they emerge to confront the party rather than the endless news stories simply focusing on latest campaign rhetoric.
Also, many people think of the labels "liberal" and "progressive" as synonymous because the movements so often overlap in their goals, but there is an important distinction, which is highlighted by this new issue.
Whereas Sanders is generally more liberal and also more progressive than Clinton, this is an issue that highlights where Sanders' position is more liberal but Hillary's position is more progressive.
Hillary folks DO REALIZE that Hillary will be found to have deliberately violated the FOIA, RIGHT?
There is a real question about whether Hillary violated the criminal laws and whether the FBI will recommend prosecution (I think it is foregone conclusion that Obama's DoJ will not act on any FBI recommendation for indictment so the criminal case ends there). I -- for one -- have doubts that Hillary is criminally responsible for violating the national security laws, and I agree that she should not be indicted (although she loses the general election if we foolishly nominate her and the FBI recommends indictment regardless of what Obama's DoJ chooses to do).
However, the three dozen (more by now) civil lawsuits seeking information as well as federal fines and penalties based on Hillary's deliberate violation of the FIOA law are going forward regardless of what the FBI recommends, and Hillary is almost certain to be found in deliberate violation of the law.
Hillary supporters act like skipping out of an indictment is the same as clearing Hillary of wrongdoing, but that is 100% incorrect. U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth found "evidence of government wrong-doing and bad faith" and specifically noted the "constantly shifting admissions by the Government and the former government officials."
U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan (a Clinton appointee for those try to write off all of Hillary misdeeds as part of a "vast right wing conspiracy"
had also previously found that the claims were sufficiently meritorious as to warrant the disclosure of the disputed emails.
Why should we care about this? MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell did a good job explaining why we should all be disappointed in this most recent episode of Hillary's laws-don't-apply-to-me problems:
"You know what’s funny to me about this is a lot of people in Liberal World today are using the Bush standard, something they normally find abhorrent on everything, including what you order for dinner. They’re using the Bush standard as the defense of Hillary. Bush’s e-mails were legally available to everyone. Hillary Clinton’s system was designed to defy Freedom of Information Act requests, which is designed to defy the law. The Freedom of Information Act and all this government transparency, which we obviously care about a lot more than voters do, that was a decades-long liberal crusade. It was liberals pushing on this from the Nixon administration forward to say, ‘There’s see much nasty stuff backstage, we have to find out how this is really working.’ So every one of these regulations– the regulation that Hillary Clinton was defying is a liberal regulation."
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