Sanders wins Iowa

[_Xenophon]

LOCK HER UP!


That reminds me, how are the investigations into Clinton going?

Not well if you liked the chant.

[_canpakes]

That reminds me, how are the investigations into Clinton going?

The one didn’t pan out. On to the next!

WASHINGTON — A yearslong State Department investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server found that while the use of the system for official business increased the risk of compromising classified information, there was no systemic or deliberate mishandling of classified information.

The inquiry, started more than three years ago, found that 38 current or former State Department officials were “culpable” of violating security procedures in a review of about 33,000 individual emails sent to or from the server that Mrs. Clinton turned over to investigators.

The nine-page unclassified report, completed last month and shared with Congress this week, appears to bookend a controversy that dogged Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign against Donald J. Trump. Mrs. Clinton blamed the F.B.I.’s handling of the inquiry for crippling her campaign after James B. Comey, then the bureau’s director, reopened his investigation into the server days before the general election after initially declining to bring charges.

“While there were some instances of classified information being inappropriately introduced into an unclassified system in furtherance of expedience,” the report said, “by and large, the individuals interviewed were aware of security policies and did their best to implement them in their operations.”

The report concluded, “There was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.”

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

So, I just dropped off my mail-in ballot for our Primary. I went ahead and picked Bloomberg because, even though I love Sanders, I don't think Sanders has the center and would most likely lose robustly to Trump. Bloomberg can make a convincing pitch to Middle America, and will need to since Trump has been pumping trillions into the market through QE to stave off a recession. Bloomberg is an actual billionaire, is from New York, and can basically go toe-to-toe with a wildly unhinged Trump and GOP political apparatus.

So. We'll see!

edit: And he seems willing to throw millions at advertising so hopefully he can counter the millions the Conservative 1%'ers are throwing at Trump's campaign.

- Doc

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

Ha. Bloomberg understands we’re in a meme era:

https://www.straitstimes.com/world/unit ... everywhere

MEME WARS 2020.

- Doc

[_Res Ipsa]

Ha. Bloomberg understands we’re in a meme era:

https://www.straitstimes.com/world/unit ... everywhere

MEME WARS 2020.

- Doc

Should we be looking for #okbloomer to trend?

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

Should we be looking for #okbloomer to trend?

Jesus, drop a resume with his campaign committee already!

- Doc

[_honorentheos]

Is Bernie the Democrats Trump?

So much as Trump represented a substantial departure from traditional GOP power centers, Sanders' ascent represents a near-total break from the Democratic Party establishment as we have known it for the last 30 years. Just as Trump trounced GOP scion Jeb Bush, who represented continuity with the Republican Party as it had been known for decades, Sanders is trouncing Biden, the primary's incarnation of Democratic Party power, stretching back to the Obamas, the Clintons, and even before. Bush and Biden served as avatars of their party establishments; the victories of Trump and Sanders (so far) show just how weak those parties have become.

One might argue that this is a good thing, insofar as it helps expose the insufficiency of the two-party duopoly, and the real and longstanding ways that binary system has failed to serve the interests of many, perhaps most, voters who don't fully align with one or the other.

Or one might argue, like Jonathan Rauch and Ray La Raja, that this represents a failure of responsibility on the parties, who have historically vetted candidates, that leads to candidates who are not only unqualified but dangerous. Indeed, candidates nominated through this process are arguably unrepresentative, in that, at least at first, they represent pluralities rather than majorities within their own parties.

I think there is some truth to both views: The old model of two-party politics, with its indifference to individual political idiosyncrasies, left out many people and worldviews. And its standard-bearers, in both parties, presided over large and ongoing failures of policy and governance. Those failures are an important driver of the Sanders-Trump backlash we're witnessing now.

Yet it's far from clear that the emerging model, with its bias toward fringe populism, is an improvement; indeed, it may be worse. For it looks increasingly plausible that it will leave us with a presidential election that offers a choice between a right-leaning authoritarian populist on one hand and a democratic socialist who has too often given a pass to foreign dictators whose politics align with his own. That's not much of a choice.

[_EAllusion]

Populist has become just a straight-up euphemism for "fascist" hasn't it? Trump campaigned on a version of right-wing economic populism in 2015-16, but abandoned it almost immediately in office. But he kept right on being called a populist in contexts where the person using the term clearly means "fascist." The line in the post above is a good example of this. The best one is when Trump's "populism" is compared to racist and/or xenophobic authoritarian movements across the globe that principally have fascist-like traits in common.

AfD, Germany's populist party...

[_EAllusion]

About a year ago, I read an article that referred to a clash between antifa and populists. I laughed so hard I couldn't breath.

Oh yeah, those dudes in decked out in Nazi symbols are united by their advocacy for anti-trust action against big banks.

[_honorentheos]

Pretty sure "right-leaning authoritarian" had you covered, EA. The author used populist to describe - rightly - a common characteristic of both Sanders and Trump's appeal to people on both ends of the political spectrum. Or do you mean that Sanders is also a fascist now?