What other word but deplorable can you use to describe these people?
” Yesterday, a German teenager dubbed the “anti-Greta” Thunberg for opposing climate activism made her Fox News debut.
Appearing on The Daily Briefing with Dana Perino, Naomi Seibt previewed the climate denial message she’ll deliver at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where she takes the stage today.
Citation From the February 27, 2020, edition of The Daily Briefing with Dana Perino:
DANA PERINO (HOST): Pretty much everybody knows who Greta Thunberg is by now, but you might also be reading about a fellow teenager making a name for herself in the political world, one who is set to take the stage at CPAC. Let’s bring in Naomi Seibt. She is a 19-year-old from Germany whose willingness to ask questions has earned her spot at CPAC tomorrow. It’s good to have you here, Naomi. So you have been hired by the Center for Climate and Environmental Policy, and you have just a different view about climate. What is it about the current narrative that kind of drives you crazy?
NAOMI SEIBT (HEARTLAND INSTITUTE): Well, it is mostly that there is so much fearmongering going on about this entire climate change propaganda that is being put out there. And I hate to see so many young people especially panicking about climate change, about a topic that they haven’t even done their research about. Because many young people, they claim to know a lot about the science, but they really don’t. And I tried approaching those young people in my own town and from all over the world, and most of them don’t really know what they are talking about. And they are just so fearful of what is to come. And I want to give them back their hope.
…
SEIBT: I absolutely believe that climate change is real. You shouldn’t ask the question “is climate change real,” because climate change has always been real. The climate has been changing for millions and billions of years. But what you should actually be asking is are humans actually destroying the planet with man-made CO2 emissions.
PERINO: And your position on that is what?
SEIBT: My position on that is no, CO2 emissions are not actually harmful to the planet. Because if you want I can talk about it more thoroughly —
PERINO: No, that’s OK. We don’t have enough time to get into all of it, I just wanted to make sure. It’s not that you think that climate change is not real, but you believe that humans have no contribution to climate change?
SEIBT: They might contribute slightly, but I think it is so insignificant that we shouldn’t focus on that. Especially we should not rush to solutions that are really not sustainable in the long term. Yeah.
PERINO: I hear you.
SEIBT: That is the main issue.
….
Seibt initially gained some notoriety for anti-climate rhetoric through her channel on YouTube, which is a popular platform for spreading climate misinformation.
The Heartland Institute reportedly began paying Seibt a monthly wage of approximately $2,000 after her videos went viral. In return, she began producing videos specifically for Heartland’s YouTube channel and appearing at the organization’s events. These videos and speeches, like her previous output, are full of climate denial talking points and geared toward young people. In December, Heartland headlined Seibt at its forum during the U.N. climate conference in Madrid.
Heartland, which has long promoted climate denial, has been funded by a number of fossil fuel interests and right-wing organizations such as Murray Energy, the Koch network, and the Mercer Family Foundation. Collectively, these groups have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to erode the public consensus around climate change and block support for climate solutions.”
They’re starting to scare me again, just like in 2016.
“At Wednesday night’s CNN town hall, moderator Don Lemon introduced a Bernie Sanders supporter named Jason Pietramala, who launched into a question dripping with smugness and sprinkled with ancient Howard Stern catchphrases.
“Hey now, Senator Warren, welcome to Charleston,” Pietramala said, scoring his first Howard brownie point as tens of neckbeards roared approval on their mom’s couches.
“During the Nevada debate, you and every other candidate on the stage, except for Bernie, hello somebody, indicated that the candidate with the plurality of delegates should not necessarily be the nominee,” he continued, adding, “This essentially means the will of the voters could be denied by the superdelegates and the DNC, which is basically undemocratic, and in my opinion is a bunch of, bababooey, to put it politely.”
The Stern bros in TV land likely needed to pause their DVRs at this point.
“Can you explain why the will of the voters should not matter if no candidate reaches a majority of delegates?” Pietramala concluded and awaited glory.
“So you do know that was Bernie’s position in 2016?” Warren replied as the cosmos played a very loud record-scratch sound effect.
“Not necessarily, no,” Pietramala spluttered.
“Yes,” Warren said.
“He won 22 states, so he went to the convention for voters,” Pietramala said.
“No, that was Bernie’s position in 2016, that it should not go to the person who had a plurality,” Warren said, adding “and remember, his last play was to super delegates.”
Warren then reminded Jason how Sanders had lobbied for the current set of rules, and added: “I don’t see how come you get to change it just because he now thinks there is an advantage to him for doing that.”
Pietramala at least got a consolation prize from Lemon, who congratulated him by saying “I got the Howard reference.”
Warren went on to say that she will fight on to the convention no matter the delegate count because “I have done pinky promises out there, so I have got to stay in this. I’ve told little girls we persist.”
Warren is, of course, correct. Despite the position he expressed during last week’s debate, Sanders said out loud, in public, that superdelegates should deliver him the nomination in 2016 even if Hillary Clinton had the most pledged delegates — but not a majority — because momentum.
He made the argument explicitly to Cenk Uygur with language that sounds a lot like the arguments being used against him now:
Tommy X-TrumpIsARacist-opher
✔
@tommyxtopher
WATCH Bernie Sanders From 2016 Explain Why Bernie Sanders From 2020 Shouldn’t Be Nominee if He Has Most Delegates
And Sanders even devoted most of an entire press conference in May of 2016 to convincing superdelegates to flip for him regardless of the pledged delegate count:
Like it or not, rules are rules. It’s just weird to dislike the rules this much when your guy had such a hand in writing them.
Jeff Weaver anywhere near your campaign scares me to death.
You don’t have to be Nostradamus to watch the frenzied raving of the Berniecrats over the past three days and not see clearly a warm summer’s day in Milwaukee on which a massive tantrum inevitably monkey-wrenches the Democratic National Convention. Not long ago, I got in touch with someone who is a Bernie fan who also was part of the party’s deliberations after the 2016 election. These discussions were designed to address complaints by a number of people regarding the nominating process, including the role of the superdelegates, which never were a great idea, but which, in the fevered brains of the most devout Berniecrats, play a role somewhere between the Daley machine and the Bavarian Illuminati…..
This person also expressed a fervent wish that the progressives in the field get together and work something out before the convention gets crazy and nominates Michael Bloomberg. The problem, of course, is that one of those candidates, Bernie Sanders, has surrounded himself with people so utterly pure in their own opinion of themselves that they object to compromises that they themselves made. Consider that over the past couple of days—or ever since a CNN town hall in which Elizabeth Warren pretty much pantsed a Bernie bro on the very topic—that Sandersland completely lost its mind on this issue. These are the facts on the ground.
1) Bernie Sanders is not a Democrat. He is an independent who quadrennially cosplays as a Democrat because he wants to run for president. For this, he should be eternally grateful that a) nobody makes the point that at least Ralph Nader had the stones to be an independent and run as an independent; and b) that he is running now and not back in the days when there really was a Democratic establishment that would have been able to crush him like a bug.
2) Bernie Sanders and his campaign are running in the Democratic nominating process at the sufferance of the Democratic Party. Not only that, but the campaign is running for the Democratic nomination under a system of rules that they themselves had a hand in drafting, and under compromises into which they freely entered. (Believe me, after 2016, there are Democrats who believe that nobody in that party owes Bernie Sanders a bean with which to bless himself.) That system was the product of vigorous and healthy debate. Those compromises were hard-won and not unreasonable. They—and the work that produced them—deserve the most basic respect of agreeing to adhere to them.
3) That’s the way it goes.
Bernie Sanders has surrounded himself with people so utterly pure in their own opinion of themselves that they object to compromises that they themselves made.
For the Sanders people to throw around accusations that The Man is keeping Bernie down again is to fail to recognize that Bernie is The Man this time around. And the prospect they could disrupt the convention if they don’t get what they want, in violation of the rules that they helped write, is the height of hubris, and you can ask Sophocles how that works out.
If you ask me what is the biggest stumbling block in the way of a Sanders nomination, I will tell you that it is a severe case of premature triumphalism among the members of his national staff and, god knows, among the angry children of the Intertoobz. Nobody owes Bernie Sanders anything. Nobody owes his campaign any more deference than they owe to the campaigns of any of the other surviving candidates. Only one campaign has people who disrupted the national convention in 2016. Only one campaign has people threatening to primary other progressive Democrats. And that campaign is the one pushing a candidate who isn’t really a Democrat anyway.
For example, there is a lot of loose talk out there about primarying Senator Professor Warren. Please. The only person remotely capable of mounting that kind of challenge in Massachusetts is Rep. Ayanna Pressley, who is currently one of Warren’s primary surrogates. And that’s not even to mention the kind of presumption it takes for various juicebox revolutionaries to make the threat in the first place. Because she told the truth about the fait accompli scam that the Sanders campaign is trying to run based on a fraction of a smidgen of the actual vote, she’s a neolib corporate sellout who wants to be Bloomberg’s vice president?
(Among the centrists, who can’t get their act sufficiently together to develop an effective opposition to Sanders, she’s being accused of campaigning to be Sanders’s vice president because she hasn’t yet been the progressive suicide bomber they need. Can’t win with folks.)
It turns out that many of the Bernie stans can be more insufferable in victory than they were in defeat. I say this in all love and Christian fellowship: Bernie Sanders and his more fervent followers and the many sanctimonious ratfckers who run his campaign can fck right off.”
A very interesting and though provoking presentation by Ambassador Chas Freeman “America in Distress: The Challenges of Disadvantageous Change”
I think this would be very informative for anybody seriously interested in the USA foreign policy. Listening to him is so sad to realize that instead of person of his caliber we have Pompous Pompeo, who forever is frozen on the level of a tank repair mechanical engineer, as the Secretary of State.
Published on Feb 24, 2020
In the United States and other democracies, political and economic systems still work in theory, but not in practice. Meanwhile, the American-led takedown of the post-World War II international system has shattered long-standing rules and norms of behavior.
The combination of disorder at home and abroad is spawning changes that are increasingly disadvantageous to the United States. With Congress having essentially walked off the job, there is a need for America’s universities to provide the information and analysis of international best practices that the political system does not.
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. is a senior fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense, ambassador to Saudi Arabia (during operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm), acting Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, and Chargé d’affaires at both Bangkok and Beijing. He began his diplomatic career in India but specialized in Chinese affairs. (He was the principal American interpreter during President Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972.)
Ambassador Freeman is a much sought-after public speaker (see http://chasfreeman.net) and the author of several well-received books on statecraft and diplomacy. His most recent book, America’s Continuing Misadventures in the Middle East was published in May 2016. Interesting Times: China, America, and the Shifting Balance of Prestige, appeared in March 2013. America’s Misadventures in the Middle East came out in 2010, as did the most recent revision of The Diplomat’s Dictionary, the companion volume to Arts of Power: Statecraft and Diplomacy. He was the editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on “diplomacy.”
Chas Freeman studied at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and in Taiwan, and earned an AB magna cum laude from Yale University as well as a JD from the Harvard Law School.
He chairs Projects International, Inc., a Washington-based firm that for more than three decades has helped its American and foreign clients create ventures across borders, facilitating their establishment of new businesses through the design, negotiation, capitalization, and implementation of greenfield investments, mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, franchises, one-off transactions, sales and agencies in other countries.
He is the author of several books including the most recent
Interesting times: China, America, and the shifting balance of prestige (2013)
Denying Sanders Dem ticket using super delegates as a ram is a possibility, but unless the candidate is Warren (which can be viewed as Sanders-light) it might have several possible negative effects:
1. Re-election of Trump due to obvious and glaring weakness of all centrists candidates (Biden-Butti-Bloomberg-Klobustar ) and the real possibility that Sanders voters abandon Dems. Moreover they are really the second rate politicians.
2. Further de-legitimization of Dems leadership which raises the question of the party chances in 2022.
Hers is one interesting comment from the discussion at Off-Guardian
Sanders was shafted in 2016 by the corrupt DNC machine, and he is being shafted again. He will probably be sidelined in favor of some third rate hack like Buttplug, or some other synthetic, manufactured nonentity.
If he isn’t, and by some miracle does secure the nomination, they will fail to support him and just allow him to be defeated by Trump. It doesn’t matter.
There are millions of decent people who have long been persuaded to play the game of Lesser Evils. They will be as disenchanted as was Trump’s Base by a transparently corrupt, rigged system, and finally withdraw their support. This has to be seen as a positive development.
Sanders’ constituency is disproportionately 45 and under, many of whom voted in the 2016 primary. The memory of the last primary theft by the DNC, added onto another convention coup will have transformative consequences for the party.
Will the party insiders allow a Sander’s nomination, or will they follow the instructions of the deep-pocketed financial backers who view Sandes as a threat to their incomes.
Nancy Pelosi recently remarked that she would be okay with a Sander’s nomination. Was she expressing a party platform, or was that the wine talking? If Sanders shows up at the convention as the leading delegate winner, but is denied the nomination, does that spawn a third party?
If Sanders is to be the spoiler, taking his marbles and goes home because he did not get a plurality, and “again” helps to cause a Dem loss in this election; by the next election, he will either be too old for any useful purpose if not dead from old age. For his self promoted righteousness women will lose the right to decide, Single Payer (which his plan is not) will be forestalled until after our life time, Trump will be re-elected and Bernie’s play-acting will reinforce his antics, and the 1-percent will lay claim to this nation. He helped make the 2020 election rules.
It was 2008 and two states were punished for defying Dem rules on primaries:
“Almost 4 weeks ago, I wrote this in answer to another commenter.
Michigan attempted to move its primary up as you said in 2008 and the result was the DNC cut Michigan’s reps votes by 50% of which Barack received a number of votes even though he was not on the ballot (Obama was not on the ballot because he withdrew in deference to this committee’s own ruling, as did the other major candidates, apart from Clinton). Clinton received 5 more votes.
Ms. Donna Brazile (now of Fox news) played a part in this.
“We need to send a message that you can’t defy the rules,” adding, “I have pissed off just about every state in my career.”
When she still had her email address on her column, I did email her and asked why she was punishing Michigan voters, a borderline state in voting for Dems, and who had a greater minority population. She got huffy and I really did not care about her anger.
It is not a matter of people obeying a federal or state law. It is a matter of a state’s voters being able to select the presidential candidate they wish. While there is no law restricting a state from moving a primary up, there is the DNC which can strip a state of its primary votes and disallowing candidates to be on the primary ticket within a state if a state moves its date up.
It is also a matter of giving less populated states greater influence in the selection of a candidate the same as their greater power to influence House legislation due to the 1929 Reapportionment Act allocating 435 representatives. Remember the argument of Wyoming having greater representation in the House by population as compared to California who are shy 14 Congressional Representatives if the Wyoming population numeric was used.
The movement of Nevada and South Carolina up was to allow more minorities into the early selection process. Both Michigan and Florida have a greater population of minorities than the entire population in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, or Nevada.
If it is to be fair in the selection process, then do a rotating date . . .
New: This is not the same issue as what the EC has from not acting properly in selecting a president and neither is this a problem of a minority of voters choosing “other” candidates besides a Democrat or a Republican. It is strictly party politics and a refusal to change. Your article runs along similar lines as what I wrote.
PS: We should defy “stupid” rules and laws which allow a minority of the population to select over the majority.”
If I have to do so, I would vote for Sanders the same as I would for Bloomberg, etc. to get trump out of office. If Sanders, his followers, and you wish to defy and give Trump another 4 years, shut up, and do it. I am weary of hearing the threats. He will own the costs of his behavior, no one else.
Here’s the sad part of this whole thing. The constant assertion by Bernie =bros that the 2016 primary was stolen by the DNC is completely false.
It was well known by everyone that Sanders had an incredible weakness in attracting non-white voters. That meant he had no chance to win the Dem primary. You could actually have named the states he would contend in before the primary, and the states he would lose in, by looking at the demographics, and the type of primary.
Low minority voters and a caucus? Good for him. High minority voters and a ballot, bad for him.
This is obviously seen by the actions of Sanders in the last 4 years to campaign for non-white voters. We’ll see if that works, though SC was a beating. No Clyburns in the other states. though.
Run,
Yeah, this shows how ridiculous the bernie bros are. Sanders helped to make the rules for the convention. Already these people are complaining about the rules, and ignoring the fact that Sanders said and did in 2016 what Biden is saying he will do now.
BTW, berniebros does not include all sanders’ supporters. The berniebros are the bernie or bust ahs.
‘m thinking the upcoming ruling on the ACA (after the election) will be determined by the results of the election. And that is with the knowledge that this case is simply childishly wrong.
“This time, though, the Court has agreed to decide on an attempt by Democratic governors and House members to save the law from a radical decision handed down by a lower court. From the Washington Post:
The House and Democratic-led states asked the court to review a decision last year by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. Hearing a challenge from Texas and other Republican-led states and backed by the Trump administration, the panel struck down the law’s mandate that individuals buy health insurance but sent back to a lower court the question of whether the rest of the statute can stand without it. The lower court had said the entire law must fall.
The House told the Supreme Court that the 5th Circuit decision “poses a severe, immediate, and ongoing threat to the orderly operation of healthcare markets throughout the country, casts considerable doubt over whether millions of individuals will continue to be able to afford vitally important care, and leaves a critical sector of the nation’s economy in unacceptable limbo.” The House and Democratic states also have been eager to get the issue before the Supreme Court because the majority that has upheld the ACA in two previous challenges remains.
The Court carefully arranged things so that any decision cannot be handed down until after the November election. Still, depending on the Roberts-Gorsuch-Kavanaugh majority to overturn a lower-court decision that gives conservatives almost everything they want on the issue seems to be a thin reed on which to hang any hopes. The statistics of what will happen if the Court gives the administration* everything it wants remain terrifying—Charles Gaba has the details in his corner of the electric Twitter machine—and the thought of this administration* trying to cobble together a healthcare plan in the middle of cobbling together a response to a worldwide pandemic just makes my brain hurt.”
“Because the Supreme Court upheld the fully functional mandate as a valid exercise of Congress’s power to tax in 2012, the Texas plaintiffs argue that the zeroed-out version of the mandate is unconstitutional — how can something be a tax if it raises no money whatsoever? They also claim that the entire Affordable Care Act must fall if the deactivated mandate is unconstitutional.
Protestors hold placards challenging “Obamacare” outside of the Supreme Court on March 4, 2015. Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
The Republican legal arguments against Obamacare in this case are widely viewed as ridiculous, even by many lawyers and scholars who spent much of the last decade trying to convince the courts to repeal President Obama’s signature achievement.
Jonathan Adler, a conservative law professor — and a leading evangelist for an earlier lawsuit seeking to undercut the Affordable Care Act by reading a poorly drafted provision of the law to cut off much of the act’s funding — labeled many of the red states’ arguments “implausible,” “hard to justify,” and “surprisingly weak.” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board labeled this lawsuit the “Texas Obamacare Blunder.” Yuval Levin, a prominent conservative policy wonk, wrote in the National Review that the Texas lawsuit “doesn’t even merit being called silly. It’s ridiculous.”
And that’s from conservatives. But if trump wins, all bets are off on the decision even though killing the ACA like this will result in 20 million people losing health insurance and kill tens of thousands of American each year.
Let them kill the ACA, then people may get angry enough to crush the Republicans for good. The rising costs are not going to go away whether ACA exists or not. They are happening outside of the ACA as it has no control over Pharma, hospital supplies, hospitals, and healthcare insurance increases when healthcare costs go up (they just pass the cost increase on to the insured and keep their percentage of the increase). Their threats of killing the ACA is like holding a gun to their own heads and claiming if it does not go away, we will shoot.
Here’s the thing.
What other word but deplorable can you use to describe these people?
” Yesterday, a German teenager dubbed the “anti-Greta” Thunberg for opposing climate activism made her Fox News debut.
Appearing on The Daily Briefing with Dana Perino, Naomi Seibt previewed the climate denial message she’ll deliver at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where she takes the stage today.
Citation From the February 27, 2020, edition of The Daily Briefing with Dana Perino:
DANA PERINO (HOST): Pretty much everybody knows who Greta Thunberg is by now, but you might also be reading about a fellow teenager making a name for herself in the political world, one who is set to take the stage at CPAC. Let’s bring in Naomi Seibt. She is a 19-year-old from Germany whose willingness to ask questions has earned her spot at CPAC tomorrow. It’s good to have you here, Naomi. So you have been hired by the Center for Climate and Environmental Policy, and you have just a different view about climate. What is it about the current narrative that kind of drives you crazy?
NAOMI SEIBT (HEARTLAND INSTITUTE): Well, it is mostly that there is so much fearmongering going on about this entire climate change propaganda that is being put out there. And I hate to see so many young people especially panicking about climate change, about a topic that they haven’t even done their research about. Because many young people, they claim to know a lot about the science, but they really don’t. And I tried approaching those young people in my own town and from all over the world, and most of them don’t really know what they are talking about. And they are just so fearful of what is to come. And I want to give them back their hope.
…
SEIBT: I absolutely believe that climate change is real. You shouldn’t ask the question “is climate change real,” because climate change has always been real. The climate has been changing for millions and billions of years. But what you should actually be asking is are humans actually destroying the planet with man-made CO2 emissions.
PERINO: And your position on that is what?
SEIBT: My position on that is no, CO2 emissions are not actually harmful to the planet. Because if you want I can talk about it more thoroughly —
PERINO: No, that’s OK. We don’t have enough time to get into all of it, I just wanted to make sure. It’s not that you think that climate change is not real, but you believe that humans have no contribution to climate change?
SEIBT: They might contribute slightly, but I think it is so insignificant that we shouldn’t focus on that. Especially we should not rush to solutions that are really not sustainable in the long term. Yeah.
PERINO: I hear you.
SEIBT: That is the main issue.
….
Seibt initially gained some notoriety for anti-climate rhetoric through her channel on YouTube, which is a popular platform for spreading climate misinformation.
The Heartland Institute reportedly began paying Seibt a monthly wage of approximately $2,000 after her videos went viral. In return, she began producing videos specifically for Heartland’s YouTube channel and appearing at the organization’s events. These videos and speeches, like her previous output, are full of climate denial talking points and geared toward young people. In December, Heartland headlined Seibt at its forum during the U.N. climate conference in Madrid.
Heartland, which has long promoted climate denial, has been funded by a number of fossil fuel interests and right-wing organizations such as Murray Energy, the Koch network, and the Mercer Family Foundation. Collectively, these groups have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to erode the public consensus around climate change and block support for climate solutions.”
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-just-debuted-rights-new-climate-denier-darling
They’re starting to scare me again, just like in 2016.
“At Wednesday night’s CNN town hall, moderator Don Lemon introduced a Bernie Sanders supporter named Jason Pietramala, who launched into a question dripping with smugness and sprinkled with ancient Howard Stern catchphrases.
“Hey now, Senator Warren, welcome to Charleston,” Pietramala said, scoring his first Howard brownie point as tens of neckbeards roared approval on their mom’s couches.
“During the Nevada debate, you and every other candidate on the stage, except for Bernie, hello somebody, indicated that the candidate with the plurality of delegates should not necessarily be the nominee,” he continued, adding, “This essentially means the will of the voters could be denied by the superdelegates and the DNC, which is basically undemocratic, and in my opinion is a bunch of, bababooey, to put it politely.”
The Stern bros in TV land likely needed to pause their DVRs at this point.
“Can you explain why the will of the voters should not matter if no candidate reaches a majority of delegates?” Pietramala concluded and awaited glory.
“So you do know that was Bernie’s position in 2016?” Warren replied as the cosmos played a very loud record-scratch sound effect.
“Not necessarily, no,” Pietramala spluttered.
“Yes,” Warren said.
“He won 22 states, so he went to the convention for voters,” Pietramala said.
“No, that was Bernie’s position in 2016, that it should not go to the person who had a plurality,” Warren said, adding “and remember, his last play was to super delegates.”
Warren then reminded Jason how Sanders had lobbied for the current set of rules, and added: “I don’t see how come you get to change it just because he now thinks there is an advantage to him for doing that.”
Pietramala at least got a consolation prize from Lemon, who congratulated him by saying “I got the Howard reference.”
Warren went on to say that she will fight on to the convention no matter the delegate count because “I have done pinky promises out there, so I have got to stay in this. I’ve told little girls we persist.”
Warren is, of course, correct. Despite the position he expressed during last week’s debate, Sanders said out loud, in public, that superdelegates should deliver him the nomination in 2016 even if Hillary Clinton had the most pledged delegates — but not a majority — because momentum.
He made the argument explicitly to Cenk Uygur with language that sounds a lot like the arguments being used against him now:
Tommy X-TrumpIsARacist-opher
✔
@tommyxtopher
WATCH Bernie Sanders From 2016 Explain Why Bernie Sanders From 2020 Shouldn’t Be Nominee if He Has Most Delegates
And Sanders even devoted most of an entire press conference in May of 2016 to convincing superdelegates to flip for him regardless of the pledged delegate count:
Like it or not, rules are rules. It’s just weird to dislike the rules this much when your guy had such a hand in writing them.
Jeff Weaver anywhere near your campaign scares me to death.
You don’t have to be Nostradamus to watch the frenzied raving of the Berniecrats over the past three days and not see clearly a warm summer’s day in Milwaukee on which a massive tantrum inevitably monkey-wrenches the Democratic National Convention. Not long ago, I got in touch with someone who is a Bernie fan who also was part of the party’s deliberations after the 2016 election. These discussions were designed to address complaints by a number of people regarding the nominating process, including the role of the superdelegates, which never were a great idea, but which, in the fevered brains of the most devout Berniecrats, play a role somewhere between the Daley machine and the Bavarian Illuminati…..
This person also expressed a fervent wish that the progressives in the field get together and work something out before the convention gets crazy and nominates Michael Bloomberg. The problem, of course, is that one of those candidates, Bernie Sanders, has surrounded himself with people so utterly pure in their own opinion of themselves that they object to compromises that they themselves made. Consider that over the past couple of days—or ever since a CNN town hall in which Elizabeth Warren pretty much pantsed a Bernie bro on the very topic—that Sandersland completely lost its mind on this issue. These are the facts on the ground.
1) Bernie Sanders is not a Democrat. He is an independent who quadrennially cosplays as a Democrat because he wants to run for president. For this, he should be eternally grateful that a) nobody makes the point that at least Ralph Nader had the stones to be an independent and run as an independent; and b) that he is running now and not back in the days when there really was a Democratic establishment that would have been able to crush him like a bug.
2) Bernie Sanders and his campaign are running in the Democratic nominating process at the sufferance of the Democratic Party. Not only that, but the campaign is running for the Democratic nomination under a system of rules that they themselves had a hand in drafting, and under compromises into which they freely entered. (Believe me, after 2016, there are Democrats who believe that nobody in that party owes Bernie Sanders a bean with which to bless himself.) That system was the product of vigorous and healthy debate. Those compromises were hard-won and not unreasonable. They—and the work that produced them—deserve the most basic respect of agreeing to adhere to them.
3) That’s the way it goes.
Bernie Sanders has surrounded himself with people so utterly pure in their own opinion of themselves that they object to compromises that they themselves made.
For the Sanders people to throw around accusations that The Man is keeping Bernie down again is to fail to recognize that Bernie is The Man this time around. And the prospect they could disrupt the convention if they don’t get what they want, in violation of the rules that they helped write, is the height of hubris, and you can ask Sophocles how that works out.
If you ask me what is the biggest stumbling block in the way of a Sanders nomination, I will tell you that it is a severe case of premature triumphalism among the members of his national staff and, god knows, among the angry children of the Intertoobz. Nobody owes Bernie Sanders anything. Nobody owes his campaign any more deference than they owe to the campaigns of any of the other surviving candidates. Only one campaign has people who disrupted the national convention in 2016. Only one campaign has people threatening to primary other progressive Democrats. And that campaign is the one pushing a candidate who isn’t really a Democrat anyway.
For example, there is a lot of loose talk out there about primarying Senator Professor Warren. Please. The only person remotely capable of mounting that kind of challenge in Massachusetts is Rep. Ayanna Pressley, who is currently one of Warren’s primary surrogates. And that’s not even to mention the kind of presumption it takes for various juicebox revolutionaries to make the threat in the first place. Because she told the truth about the fait accompli scam that the Sanders campaign is trying to run based on a fraction of a smidgen of the actual vote, she’s a neolib corporate sellout who wants to be Bloomberg’s vice president?
(Among the centrists, who can’t get their act sufficiently together to develop an effective opposition to Sanders, she’s being accused of campaigning to be Sanders’s vice president because she hasn’t yet been the progressive suicide bomber they need. Can’t win with folks.)
It turns out that many of the Bernie stans can be more insufferable in victory than they were in defeat. I say this in all love and Christian fellowship: Bernie Sanders and his more fervent followers and the many sanctimonious ratfckers who run his campaign can fck right off.”
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a31153751/bernie-sanders-democratic-convention-plurality-delegates/
A very interesting and though provoking presentation by Ambassador Chas Freeman “America in Distress: The Challenges of Disadvantageous Change”
I think this would be very informative for anybody seriously interested in the USA foreign policy. Listening to him is so sad to realize that instead of person of his caliber we have Pompous Pompeo, who forever is frozen on the level of a tank repair mechanical engineer, as the Secretary of State.
Denying Sanders Dem ticket using super delegates as a ram is a possibility, but unless the candidate is Warren (which can be viewed as Sanders-light) it might have several possible negative effects:
1. Re-election of Trump due to obvious and glaring weakness of all centrists candidates (Biden-Butti-Bloomberg-Klobustar ) and the real possibility that Sanders voters abandon Dems. Moreover they are really the second rate politicians.
2. Further de-legitimization of Dems leadership which raises the question of the party chances in 2022.
Hers is one interesting comment from the discussion at Off-Guardian
and the other from
https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2020/03/democrat-morning-sickness-in-south-carolina-by-larry-c-johnson.html#comments
likbez:
If Sanders is to be the spoiler, taking his marbles and goes home because he did not get a plurality, and “again” helps to cause a Dem loss in this election; by the next election, he will either be too old for any useful purpose if not dead from old age. For his self promoted righteousness women will lose the right to decide, Single Payer (which his plan is not) will be forestalled until after our life time, Trump will be re-elected and Bernie’s play-acting will reinforce his antics, and the 1-percent will lay claim to this nation. He helped make the 2020 election rules.
It was 2008 and two states were punished for defying Dem rules on primaries:
If I have to do so, I would vote for Sanders the same as I would for Bloomberg, etc. to get trump out of office. If Sanders, his followers, and you wish to defy and give Trump another 4 years, shut up, and do it. I am weary of hearing the threats. He will own the costs of his behavior, no one else.
Here’s the sad part of this whole thing. The constant assertion by Bernie =bros that the 2016 primary was stolen by the DNC is completely false.
It was well known by everyone that Sanders had an incredible weakness in attracting non-white voters. That meant he had no chance to win the Dem primary. You could actually have named the states he would contend in before the primary, and the states he would lose in, by looking at the demographics, and the type of primary.
Low minority voters and a caucus? Good for him. High minority voters and a ballot, bad for him.
This is obviously seen by the actions of Sanders in the last 4 years to campaign for non-white voters. We’ll see if that works, though SC was a beating. No Clyburns in the other states. though.
Run,
Yeah, this shows how ridiculous the bernie bros are. Sanders helped to make the rules for the convention. Already these people are complaining about the rules, and ignoring the fact that Sanders said and did in 2016 what Biden is saying he will do now.
BTW, berniebros does not include all sanders’ supporters. The berniebros are the bernie or bust ahs.
‘m thinking the upcoming ruling on the ACA (after the election) will be determined by the results of the election. And that is with the knowledge that this case is simply childishly wrong.
“This time, though, the Court has agreed to decide on an attempt by Democratic governors and House members to save the law from a radical decision handed down by a lower court. From the Washington Post:
The House and Democratic-led states asked the court to review a decision last year by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. Hearing a challenge from Texas and other Republican-led states and backed by the Trump administration, the panel struck down the law’s mandate that individuals buy health insurance but sent back to a lower court the question of whether the rest of the statute can stand without it. The lower court had said the entire law must fall.
The House told the Supreme Court that the 5th Circuit decision “poses a severe, immediate, and ongoing threat to the orderly operation of healthcare markets throughout the country, casts considerable doubt over whether millions of individuals will continue to be able to afford vitally important care, and leaves a critical sector of the nation’s economy in unacceptable limbo.” The House and Democratic states also have been eager to get the issue before the Supreme Court because the majority that has upheld the ACA in two previous challenges remains.
The Court carefully arranged things so that any decision cannot be handed down until after the November election. Still, depending on the Roberts-Gorsuch-Kavanaugh majority to overturn a lower-court decision that gives conservatives almost everything they want on the issue seems to be a thin reed on which to hang any hopes. The statistics of what will happen if the Court gives the administration* everything it wants remain terrifying—Charles Gaba has the details in his corner of the electric Twitter machine—and the thought of this administration* trying to cobble together a healthcare plan in the middle of cobbling together a response to a worldwide pandemic just makes my brain hurt.”
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a31190875/supreme-court-hear-obamacare-case-affordable-care-act/
Reply Monday, March 02, 2020 at 10:30 AM
EMichael said in reply to EMichael…
And how childish is this case?
“Because the Supreme Court upheld the fully functional mandate as a valid exercise of Congress’s power to tax in 2012, the Texas plaintiffs argue that the zeroed-out version of the mandate is unconstitutional — how can something be a tax if it raises no money whatsoever? They also claim that the entire Affordable Care Act must fall if the deactivated mandate is unconstitutional.
Protestors hold placards challenging “Obamacare” outside of the Supreme Court on March 4, 2015. Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
The Republican legal arguments against Obamacare in this case are widely viewed as ridiculous, even by many lawyers and scholars who spent much of the last decade trying to convince the courts to repeal President Obama’s signature achievement.
Jonathan Adler, a conservative law professor — and a leading evangelist for an earlier lawsuit seeking to undercut the Affordable Care Act by reading a poorly drafted provision of the law to cut off much of the act’s funding — labeled many of the red states’ arguments “implausible,” “hard to justify,” and “surprisingly weak.” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board labeled this lawsuit the “Texas Obamacare Blunder.” Yuval Levin, a prominent conservative policy wonk, wrote in the National Review that the Texas lawsuit “doesn’t even merit being called silly. It’s ridiculous.”
https://www.vox.com/2020/3/2/21147037/obamacare-supreme-court-texas-john-roberts
And that’s from conservatives. But if trump wins, all bets are off on the decision even though killing the ACA like this will result in 20 million people losing health insurance and kill tens of thousands of American each year.
They are beyond evil.
EM:
Let them kill the ACA, then people may get angry enough to crush the Republicans for good. The rising costs are not going to go away whether ACA exists or not. They are happening outside of the ACA as it has no control over Pharma, hospital supplies, hospitals, and healthcare insurance increases when healthcare costs go up (they just pass the cost increase on to the insured and keep their percentage of the increase). Their threats of killing the ACA is like holding a gun to their own heads and claiming if it does not go away, we will shoot.