2020 Democratic Candidates Tracker

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acbytesla said:
Obama flirted with Saul Alinsky? Surely ye jest. And the idea that he flirted with Jeremiah Wright is also moronically stupid. Where do the right wing nutjobs come up with this crap? Alinsky died in 1972 and Jeremiah Wright was the pastor of a church that Obama attended.
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Frankly, I find condemnations of the US for using missiles against medical teams (I have no issue with drone strikes against legitimate targets in battle, just to be clear), or for open bigotry written into law, to be vastly superior to the idea that God will condemn the US because we don't kill dudes that fall in love with other dudes.

I mean, I'm an atheist so I don't actually believe either, but there's a substantial difference in basic humanity there.
 
JoeMorgue said:
My personal opinion is that we could quibble over whether or not it's fair/right/proper/whatever to take voting rights away from people while they actively serving their sentences. I'm against it personally, but it's fair argument to put on the table.

But there's no version of not letting felons who have completed their sentences vote that rings reasonable to me.
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Seems reasonable, with a few caveats:

First, people being held because they can't afford bond, but have not been put on trial yet, should be allowed to vote. although really, we should rethink who we put in prison, and how we assign bail payments, but this is a step in the right direction until we can reform the larger system.

Second, in many areas prisoners are counted as population of the (often rural) areas where they are imprisoned, despite having no real connection with anyone there. Either count them as populating their last known residence before imprisonment, or allow them to vote as part of the rural areas where they are imprisoned. To do otherwise gives a perverse incentive for rural people to impose harsh prison terms on people in urban areas.
 
I don't know if this has been mentioned yet, but it looks pretty bad for Biden:

Joe Biden's 2020 Ukrainian nightmare: A closed probe is revived

In his own words, with video cameras rolling, Biden described how he threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if it didn’t immediately fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.

“I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion.’ I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’” Biden recalled telling Poroshenko.
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But Ukrainian officials tell me there was one crucial piece of information that Biden must have known but didn’t mention to his audience: The prosecutor he got fired was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings that employed Biden’s younger son, Hunter, as a board member.

U.S. banking records show Hunter Biden’s American-based firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, received regular transfers into one of its accounts — usually more than $166,000 a month — from Burisma from spring 2014 through fall 2015, during a period when Vice President Biden was the main U.S. official dealing with Ukraine and its tense relations with Russia.
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So Biden, Vice President at the time, put political pressure on the president of Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was conducting a probe into a company on which his son sat as a member of the board of directors and drew a six-figure seven-figure salary.

This sort of thing could be a nasty political nightmare if Biden is the nominee. Sorta like Hillary's private email server was an albatross around her campaign's neck.

From the New York Times in 2015:
Joe Biden, His Son and the Case Against a Ukrainian Oligarch
 
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theprestige said:
Yes and yes.

Now what?
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You are against society? That doesn't strike me as an honest answer. If you were, odds are you wouldn't A) be a conservative and B) discuss social issues on a web forum.

Or did you mean that your actions were against society? In that case, shouldn't put you away and strip you of your rights?
 
Mumbles said:
Second, in many areas prisoners are counted as population of the (often rural) areas where they are imprisoned, despite having no real connection with anyone there. Either count them as populating their last known residence before imprisonment, or allow them to vote as part of the rural areas where they are imprisoned. To do otherwise gives a perverse incentive for rural people to impose harsh prison terms on people in urban areas.
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We could reduce the impact of these populations by counting them at some fraction. 60% seems apt.

Puppycow said:
From the New York Times in 2015:
Joe Biden, His Son and the Case Against a Ukrainian Oligarch
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I can't even imagine a campaign with dirty Ukranian corruption on both major candidates. If Manafort is pardoned, he can work for both of them.
 
varwoche said:
Alinsky dredged up again? I'd never heard of him until he became a right-wing talisman, as we were reminded time and again by long departed colleague mhaze.
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Amazing isn't it? Alinsky was a very effective grass roots organizer He's kind of a must read for political organizers regardless of their political perspective. Some of Alinsky's tactics were over the top. One of his funny ideas was a fart in. Where protesters would go to a fancy Republican event having chowed down on beans and then fart up a storm. I don't think he ever did that. But he was a master of getting attention and causingb disruption. Hillary has more of a connection to her than Obama since she wrote a paper on him while in College and IIRC met him.

Republicans hate him like they do Soros just like they admire Karl Rove, Richard Nixon and Goebbels.
 
Belz... said:
You are against society? That doesn't strike me as an honest answer. If you were, odds are you wouldn't A) be a conservative and B) discuss social issues on a web forum.

Or did you mean that your actions were against society? In that case, shouldn't put you away and strip you of your rights?
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As long as we agree that different crimes have different severity, and that therefore their consequences should also have different severity, I don't see the problem.

Tell me what you believe is the correct approach to the questions raised, and why, and I'll tell you whether I agree, and why.
 
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The Atheist said:
Truthdig has a very large and righteous dig at Creepy Joe.

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/joe-biden-is-a-phony-plain-and-simple/
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I dunno. I'm no fan of Joe Biden, but this seems like pretty weak sauce. Lots of emotional language to describe incidents, in place of simple statements of fact. Sure, there are links, but you follow the links to find out what all the heated rhetoric is about, and end up asking "that's all?"

The article is mostly interesting due to the factional autophagy aspect. But even that is normal at this point in the campaign. The party is trying to find a nominee, so everyone is in Ideological Purge and Purity mode right now. As soon as a nominee is found, all this prog-on-prog knife fighting will stop, and the Chosen One will go back to being as pure a party figurehead as one could reasonably hope for.

If Biden gets nominated, all these grievous crimes will be swept right back under the rug. Disqualifying? Of course not! Nobody's perfect. Every candidate has something to explain. Biden is a good Democrat and a great guy. None of this other stuff matters, in the face of ORANGE MAN BAD.

Biden probably won't get nominated, but if he did, I bet the author of this article won't waste any time publishing a new piece dismissing exactly the criticisms of Biden that he raises here.
 
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Get it all out of the system now ... by the time of the nomination, it will become clear if anything actually managed to stick.
Since Ralph Northam, we have learned that it is possible to survive scandals even as a Democrat, if you just manage to get out of the news again.
By the time of the election, voters will have internalized that the accusations couldn't have been all that serious, or the person wouldn't be a candidate.
 
The Great Zaganza said:
Get it all out of the system now ... by the time of the nomination, it will become clear if anything actually managed to stick.
Since Ralph Northam, we have learned that it is possible to survive scandals even as a Democrat, if you just manage to get out of the news again.
By the time of the election, voters will have internalized that the accusations couldn't have been all that serious, or the person wouldn't be a candidate.
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That's an interesting way to look at it. For sure, that mentality is going to work in Trump's favor, if Congress decides not to impeach.
 
theprestige said:
That's an interesting way to look at it. For sure, that mentality is going to work in Trump's favor, if Congress decides not to impeach.
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It's all priced-in for Trump: he has always distracted from his last scandal by causing a new one.
This doesn't work for Dems, but time might.
 
I have watched some of the bad crime moves set in New York City in the 1980's recently - Death Wish, Fort Apache The Bronx, etc. Looking at those dystopian images and thinking about what the murder rates were back then, I can almost excuse the crime bill nonsense and "super predators" and what-not that we heard in the 90's. People were freaking out and they didn't know what to do. Enter David Dinkins, broken windows, mandatory minimums, etc.

Biden's anti-busing stance is probably the worst of it, given the Senators that he worked with.
 
theprestige said:
As long as we agree that different crimes have different severity, and that therefore their consequences should also have different severity, I don't see the problem.

Tell me what you believe is the correct approach to the questions raised, and why, and I'll tell you whether I agree, and why.
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Now you are introducing severity as a factor? Just pulling things out of a hat.
 
BobTheCoward said:
Now you are introducing severity as a factor? Just pulling things out of a hat.
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Severity has always been a factor in crime and punishment. That is so universal an opinion and practice that most people never feel the need to specify it, and properly assume that it is always implicit in the discussion. If you feel severity should not be a factor, then you need to make that explicit or people will (again, properly) assume otherwise.

And you didn't actually answer his query.
 
Ziggurat said:
Severity has always been a factor in crime and punishment. That is so universal an opinion and practice that most people never feel the need to specify it, and properly assume that it is always implicit in the discussion. If you feel severity should not be a factor, then you need to make that explicit or people will (again, properly) assume otherwise.

And you didn't actually answer his query.
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I don't have an opinion on the question asked. It is pretty hard to form a new one when a person gives an unqualified statement and then qualifies it the next day.
 
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