2020 Democratic presidential primary

lol

Wouldn’t buttigieg’s plan enshrine the two party systwm (and thus the republican party) permanently in the constitution?

If only he had been around in the 19th century, the Whigs would still be guaranteed the Supreme Court Justices they deserve.

we need 5 supreme court justices for every political ideology with its own wikipedia page

The West Wing is called 'Presidenten' in Norwegian, and 'Præsidentens Mænd' in Danish, which is, like, one of the most sexist retitlings in the history of television.

All the Præsidentens Mænd

he fucked that elephant up

BREAKING: Today the @DNC told the @JayInslee campaign that they will not host a climate debate.

— Jamal Raad (@jamalraad) June 5, 2019

don't scare the electorate with sacrifice

how about including climate change as a question in any of the debates this year? that would be an improvement over 2016, at least. they could just include the climate question as part of the overall suite of questions. you know, a real "All of the Above" strategy for the climate question

the cool candidates should just organize their own climate-specific debate, honestly. "we are here because while we disagree on some specifics, we agree with the american people and with scientists worldwide that we face perhaps the greatest crisis in our history, and we believe we owe it to the voters to talk turkey" etc. etc.

the cool candidates should just organize their own climate-specific debate, honestly

on that subject

.@JayInslee says in a statement that the DNC turned down his request for a climate debate and "if we participated in anyone else's climate debate, we will not be invited to future debates." pic.twitter.com/uT628MnoS0

— Gideon Resnick (@GideonResnick) June 5, 2019

Counterpoint: I don't care so long as negotiations with debate moderators include climate change questions.

xp wow I didn't think I could hate the DNC any more than I already did but there ya go

^^^

the hell

Warren on Chris Hayes' show tonight -- townhall.

she's fucking killing this.

good, let's put the damn stake in Biden's heart already:

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/joe-biden-supports-hyde-amendment-splits-2020-dems/story?id=63506190

Fuck Tom Perez.

Gov. Inslee is exactly right. Climate change is the biggest challenge we face. Every candidate running for president should have a serious set of policies to address it, and should be eager to defend those proposals in a debate. https://t.co/6uprXIJKa2

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) June 6, 2019

Jay Inslee Says He May Defy the DNC on a Climate Change Debate

I sure hope he does.

seconded

totally makes sense for him to do it. it helps the cause he's trying to promote. even if he were to participate in one of the main debates, he would get 1/12th of the questions. he could make all of his answers about climate change in some way, but it would be easily drowned out by the rest of the debate. a sacrilegious climate change debate would be entirely about his primary issue, and would get much more attention than it would have without the DNC's unwelcome boner.

is warren insinuating that she would also 'defy the DNC' and attend a non-sanctioned climate change debate? it seems like it, and i hope all the other leading candidates do the same. if there's critical mass perhaps the DNC will relent

Whew! That didn't take long.

Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Thursday reversed his support for the Hyde Amendment, a measure that prohibits most federal funding for abortion, after facing nearly two days of vigorous backlash from many in his own party.

Mr. Biden denounced the amendment in a speech before a Democratic National Committee gala in Georgia, where the Republican governor recently signed into law a far-reaching anti-abortion bill. A number of Republican-led states, mostly in the South, have passed restrictive abortion laws in recent months.

Mr. Biden cited those efforts, calling them “extreme laws,” as he explained his decision to change course on an issue that had been the latest example of Mr. Biden’s refusal to bow to Democratic Party litmus tests.

“If I believe health care is a right, as I do, I can no longer support an amendment that makes that right dependent on someone’s zip code,” Mr. Biden said.

When Joe Biden sexually harasses 14 year old girls, do you think he ever goes, "hey, they call me Grow Biden. Wanna see why?"

no

True. That's why my vote is committed to Elizabeth Warren. She talks the talk, baby.

Hail Jupiter. Hail Rome.

oh god another "comedy" account

I haven’t figured out who they’re targeting. Hope they don’t think they’re getting Zion

I haven’t figured out who they’re targeting. Hope they don’t think they’re getting Zion

i haven't been following the gravel saga too closely. i didn't realize that teenagers really ARE running his campaign, sorta

https://i.imgur.com/AIYLPYo.jpg

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/06/magazine/mike-gravel-teens-twitter-presidential-campaign.html

tbh, #gravelistas would probably fit right in here at ilx

Broadly speaking, the Mike Gravel campaign is part of the same Democratic Socialist moment that elected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018 and nearly nominated Bernie Sanders in 2016. If Gravel seemed like a sideshow in 2008, then today — post-recession, post-Occupy, post-Trump — his campaign represents the most absurd form of a legitimate movement on the left that feels little obligation to the Democratic Party. Among this young, emergent class of leftists, change is enacted through local organizing efforts, and discourse tends to play out on Twitter, where news, and the organizations that produce it, are subject to daily systemic critique. The rise of leftist discourse on Twitter has helped to hone a new political humor that undergirds the @MikeGravel campaign. The target of this humor is not President Trump but rather what the far left sees as a defeatist and servile center-left that values compromise over belief and denigrates the social reforms beloved by the very same voters it seeks.

These values are ingrained in the center-left’s own humor, exemplified by late-night hosts’ trying to outreason Trump by fact-checking his tweets or calling him names like a lying orange Cheeto. If center-left humor says that Trump can be outwitted — despite what the overwhelming evidence suggests — then far-left humor is much more concerned with mocking the kind of political system that says you have to argue with someone like him at all. Williams describes this strain of humor as “a kind of postmodern ironic detachment, coupled with real earnestness.” Often this particular earnestness is vulgar, using bluntness as an antidote to self-regard. When I asked one #Gravelanche supporter what he thought of the candidate Kamala Harris, a former attorney general of California, he suggested that she “would be a good secret-police chief.” When I asked him what he thought of older voters, he said: “Older people are going to be dead in 10 years, so they just want their tax money and [expletive] to buy kangaroo-skin dildos.”

Elizabeth Warren Spends Evenings Tutoring Underperforming Candidates On Creating Comprehensive Policy https://t.co/dzPupnyQGy pic.twitter.com/RAAnAf02k3

— The Onion (@TheOnion) June 6, 2019

haven't been following the gravel saga too closely. i didn't realize that teenagers really ARE running his campaign, sorta

love the Gravel teens

that gravel teens NYT mag story i posted above is really, really good btw. honestly i just posted the image at the top because i thought it was funny, but it turns out to be a wonderful portrait of the teens (a mix between bill haverchuk on freaks and geeks, max fischer on rushmore, and kramer) wrapped around a critique of the center-left that they oppose and their own naiveté

would be really into a short-lived saturday morning cartoon called Gravel And The Gravel-Teens, btw

A drink called the Gravelteeni

Should be like the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators books, where the teens check in with Gravel at the end of each political adventure

the actual Gravel is a crank with weird/bad associations sadly typical of aging leftists, but the Gravel teens rule

doesn't gravel think 9/11 was an inside job?

he definitely palled around w/ truthers at least

I took one of those "which candidate do you match up with best" online quizzes back in the day and got Gravel; I spent the rest of the day being sad

the Gravel campaign just seems cringey to me in exactly the same way it was cringey when Hillary tweeted "delete your account", but everyone who hated the latter seems to love the former?

Hillary tweeting "delete your account" was a center-right boomer cynically appropriating youth culture in service of neoliberal goals.

The Gravel tweets are leftist teens appropriating the image of a boomer politician in service of socialist goals.

Disliking the first and appreciating the second seems totally intellectually consistent to me.

The only thing those two phenomena have in common is twitter

worst venn ever

saw one spicy meatball tweet from gravel re biden and did wonder whether he was maybe a little unhinged... it makes sense now

wow

Beto O’Rourke in Knoxville, Iowa, being introduced by a local Dem who calls him “a blank slate waiting to be filled by our hopes and dreams.” pic.twitter.com/JvZkEwrk1R

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) June 7, 2019

local Dem is antifa

"but in a good way"