California Democrats, stop being stupid

[JCanete]

249. I didn't do that, and I agree that that is a direction I don't want to take this conversation.

Some things are being conflated. As to who sounds like a republican mouthpiece, I'm only talking about our corporate media, not you, and not democrats. In terms of who is responsible for the drastic explosion of wealth disparity, yes, that is owned in part by our democratic leadership, from a history of absent or lacking rhetoric on the matter, to the very moderate corrective measures we've taken when in power. Arguably though, as I've already said, that is the fault of national awareness. I can be mad at the leadership for not pushing that awareness but certainly that comes with risk. Again, there has to be risk to not promoting these ideas to balance the risk of pissing off powerful interests that will dump millions into the opposition.

In terms of your arguments against promoting universal health care, yes those are absolutely problematic to me. The same forces that have prevented this progress from happening at the federal level have prevented it at the state level. Your impressive willingness to assume that the legislation must just be flawed and that's why it hasn't been passed should certainly be reevaluated, and I'd be surprised if you made that argument regarding any other issue. Was Clinton's universal healthcare plan also flawed? Is that why that got destroyed? Or was it something else?

Either tell me why negotiating from the middle is better than negotiating from the left is a good idea, or admit that we're going about it wrong. The Republicans understand this. They go full hog and then democrats come back to us and say they have no choice but to compromise or risk far more draconian legislation.

Yes, we have raised taxes on the rich. I acknowledge that. Not near high enough and all the ways that the rich have distanced themselves even further from the rest of us through the decades indicates that pretty strongly.