I will keep doing, but not worth it! The 2016 Presidential Primary Voting Thread

Sanders is farther to the left than Obama and I think there is a good argument to be made that Obama was not a left-wing protest candidate.

bill bradley who was the first such character i hopelessly voted for.

Bradley was my senator for many years in NJ and ugggggh, he was no lefty insurgent. Rubberstamped Reaganite contra funding, prioritized 'deficit reduction' in the '80s among other crimes. Held my nose and voted for him vs Gore in 2000, not fondly.

lol bradley was the speaker at my college graduation

he went on and on about the deficit

btw the raison d'etre of Eugene McCarthy's campaign was to get us out of Vietnam

that carpetbagger RFK changed his spots and leapt in once that had been illustrated to be a winning issue

i agree that bradley was not really much to the left of gore, but that's certainly what he was pitched and spun as. so he's relevant to the set under discussion re: the question: is sanders further left, and more successful, that previous characters in this role?

sure seems like it to me, I mean Gary Hart is the only other primary challenger since 1980 that I can think of who could even be thought of as leaning "left" at all!

easy to forget now, but dean was also understood that way.

no win in NY, and not 50-50, but i agree that it will be closer than people think.

― rmde bob (will), Monday, February 22, 2016 2:04 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

people saying 50/50 like this itt, do you mean the outcome is totally uncertain, or the popular vote will be close to even for each candidate?

they are different. e.g. the 2012 was never really in doubt, but the popular vote was close to even.

Hart was not to the left of Mondale. He campaigned against the Great Society and New Deal!

See: Atari Democrats.

Mondale was really the last of the New Deal true believers.

New Ideas (TM) xp

except for the hotzy action on the trail, that was his old idea

caek: popular vote will be closer than any reasonable person should feel comfortable with.

not sure if Trump can pick up any states that Romney lost, but nothing surprises me at this point.

the popular vote is always "close", but there seems to be a lot of confusion that that implies incertainty

not saying this particular election is certain, but it's important to keep the difference in mind when having a bout of 2016 worries: are you just worrying that the election is close?

not so much worried as repulsed

the only reason people thought bradley was to the left of gore is because he could sink a jumpshot

about 6 states matter in our prez elections, w/ possible exception of when there is a serious third-party run (eg Perot, Wallace).

voting for the same candidate that Bill Kristol will does NOT repulse you, huh

Here's the thing. Hillary needs to take Bill out of the picture as much as possible as soon as possible. I think everyone's underestimating the extent to which her most corrosive negative will turn out to be just this. The more he hovers behind her at every victory speech, mouth agape, the more people will be like WTF are we really doing THIS again? I say "people" but tbh that's how a part of me feels. When I see Bill, Hillary and Chelsea up on stage I get this overwhelming, visceral sense of claustrophobia, like we're trapped in an elevator with these people, and that's all history will ever give us. Repetition is madness, etc. Now I'm not about to vote for Trump on the basis of this feeling, but how many others might?

apparently bernie called for abolishing the CIA back in the '70s and now the hillary campaign is trying to use that against him

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/bernie-sanders-cia-219451#ixzz40vSbhhxK

Gore's jump shot was notoriously weak-ass.

Contrariwise, my respect for Bradley stems mainly from this John McPhee passage:

Last summer, the floor of the Princeton gym was being resurfaced, so Bradley had to put in several practice sessions at the Lawrenceville School. His first afternoon at Lawrenceville, he began by shooting fourteen-foot jump shots from the right side. He got off to a bad start, and he kept missing them. Six in a row hit the back rim of the basket and bounced out. He stopped, looking discomfited, and seemed to be making an adjustment in his mind. Then he went up for another jump shot from the same spot and hit it cleanly. Four more shots went in without a miss, and then he paused and said, “You want to know something? That basket is about an inch and a half low.” Some weeks later, I went back to Lawrenceville with a steel tape, borrowed a stepladder, and measured the height of the basket. It was nine feet ten and seven-eighths inches above the floor, or one and one-eighth inches too low.

they are different. e.g. the 2012 was never really in doubt, but the popular vote was close to even.

Uh Romney lost by like 5 million votes. The 2000 election was close to even. 2012 not so much.

Abolishing the CIA in the 1970s would have unilaterally disarmed America during the height of the Cold War and at a time when terrorist networks across the Middle East were gaining strength

wow

xp

47/51, which is what 2012 was, is close in the context of polling that is accurate to 3%.

and people sometimes seem to think closer than a few per cent implies a toss up. if it did, they'd all be toss ups.

but they're not. they're all close, but they're not all uncertain. that's my point.

hillary has such bad political instincts

guys remember when the supreme court gave the presidency to george w. bush and how that was somehow okay

dlh are u sayin wow because, like, the cia was directly radicalizing the founding fathers of the current middle east terror kults in the 70s cause anyway that's why i'm sayin wow but there are probably other reasons too

that was it yeah

Abolishing the CIA in the 1970s would have unilaterally disarmed America during the height of the Cold War and at a time when terrorist networks across the Middle East were gaining strength

It's true. The middle east of South America was full of terrorist cells!

I expect Hilz to rap Bernie's knuckles over Contract support next.

Contra support too

http://33.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mbp28blMzK1qi4nyc.png

sad lol at "an arcane reference to a 1953 u.s.-backed coup in iran."

i do think that kind of thing (advocating for CIA disbandment) could hurt bernie in the general, but i can't imagine it doing shit in the primary.

Beltway wisdom is so corroded that a Politico reporter has to assume the audience shares his confusion over what happened in Iran in 1953. It's the I-can't -believe-he said-that shit about Kissinger again

daniel patrick moynihan called for the CIA to be abolished a few times back in the 90s

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/3gwPbrg40DNQRVFoaVbVk_hn9fkfGcFbi8ssiAnGU48JOtjWHkEhYKHxe_LFq4KObfriiC7R4vqeScmlvDQf72bBBA

^^^Well! Nightmares ahead

trump 52%
rubio 45
kasich 2
cruz 1

for the gop nom according to predictwise on the new cruz news

one of the few times i'd recommend the audiobook, it's amazing

Wonderful book I finished a couple weeks ago: http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/10/book-review-devils-chessboard-david-talbot

Why is cruz so low in that poll?

it's not a poll, it's an agreggate of people betting money on the outcome

Give'em hell, Harry!

I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—CIA. At least, I would like to submit here the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency during my Administration, what I expected it to do and how it was to operate as an arm of the President.
I think it is fairly obvious that by and large a President's performance in office is as effective as the information he has and the information he gets. That is to say, that assuming the President himself possesses a knowledge of our history, a sensitive understanding of our institutions, and an insight into the needs and aspirations of the people, he needs to have available to him the most accurate and up-to-the-minute information on what is going on everywhere in the world, and particularly of the trends and developments in all the danger spots in the contest between East and West. This is an immense task and requires a special kind of an intelligence facility.
Of course, every President has available to him all the information gathered by the many intelligence agencies already in existence. The Departments of State, Defense, Commerce, Interior and others are constantly engaged in extensive information gathering and have done excellent work.
But their collective information reached the President all too frequently in conflicting conclusions. At times, the intelligence reports tended to be slanted to conform to established positions of a given department. This becomes confusing and what's worse, such intelligence is of little use to a President in reaching the right decisions.
Therefore, I decided to set up a special organization charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without department "treatment" or interpretations.
I wanted and needed the information in its "natural raw" state and in as comprehensive a volume as it was practical for me to make full use of it. But the most important thing about this move was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions—and I thought it was necessary that the President do his own thinking and evaluating.
Since the responsibility for decision making was his—then he had to be sure that no information is kept from him for whatever reason at the discretion of any one department or agency, or that unpleasant facts be kept from him. There are always those who would want to shield a President from bad news or misjudgments to spare him from being "upset."
For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.

It's the New Ted Cruz News
Comin' right at you

I wanted and needed the information in its "natural raw" state and in as comprehensive a volume as it was practical for me to make full use of it.

scarface.jpg

in that document...

PEEEOOWWW

...lay the founding of POLITICO

correct me if i'm wrong but truman's own national security policy would have required constant global "intervention" and "police action" regardless of which american military or paramilitary body performed it, so continuing to support the nsc-68 worldview and diagnosis while simultaneously complaining about eisenhower using the cia operationally instead of sending america to war every time there was a colonial uprising is kind of lame. (idk what truman said late in life about cold war premises but i'd be surprised if it were interesting.)

yes and Eisenhower lamented the military industrial blah blah blah after unleashing the CIA on every American foe. These guys get presidential when they leave office.

Cruz fired his media guy today at Rubio's request:

http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/22/politics/rick-tyler-marco-rubio-video-apology/

The guy's been all over CNN the past few weeks.