2020 Democratic Candidates Tracker - Part II

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Sounds like a lies, damn lies, and statistics type thing.

We're all familiar with the rhetorical technique of cherry picking facts to misrepresent or obscure the truth.
 
Perhaps he was supposed to say "fantasy" rather than "facts". As the brain ages sometimes it gets hard to get quite the word you meant, so you land on one that starts the same. My grandparents all did that in their nineties and hundreds. The charitable view is that Biden isn't an idiot, he's merely withered mentally from the vast age of his dusty brain, perhaps it was structurally weakened by all that hypocrisy and self-serving jerkishness that imbued his every action long ago when he was alive.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Perhaps he was supposed to say "fantasy" rather than "facts". As the brain ages sometimes it gets hard to get quite the word you meant, so you land on one that starts the same. My grandparents all did that in their nineties and hundreds. The charitable view is that Biden isn't an idiot, he's merely withered mentally from the vast age of his dusty brain, perhaps it was structurally weakened by all that hypocrisy and self-serving jerkishness that imbued his every action long ago when he was alive.
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I think the charitable view is that Biden is talking about cherry-picking rather than honest representation of the truth.

Kind of like how you're spouting facts about senility, without actually getting to anything true about Biden.
 
theprestige said:
I think the charitable view is that Biden is talking about cherry-picking rather than honest representation of the truth.

Kind of like how you're spouting facts about senility, without actually getting to anything true about Biden.
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Sure, I didn't. Biden's as mentally nimble as the first time he ran for president decades ago. In 1988. What a great year that was! I was in sixth grade. Biden was older then than I am now, and I'm in my forties. He certainly doesn't constantly misspeak himself into embarrassing gaffes, usually along racial lines like this week when he contrasted "white" against "poor" when talking about students to a room full of non-white people. Biden's clean and articulate, one of the good ones.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Sure, I didn't. Biden's as mentally nimble as the first time he ran for president decades ago. In 1988. What a great year that was! I was in sixth grade. Biden was older then than I am now, and I'm in my forties. He certainly doesn't constantly misspeak himself into embarrassing gaffes, usually along racial lines like this week when he contrasted "white" against "poor" when talking about students to a room full of non-white people. Biden's clean and articulate, one of the good ones.
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This seems to be more about personal hatred for Biden, than about any question of truth versus facts.

I don't mind if you want to continue your rant, but could you at least take a moment to acknowledge the problem of cherry picking versus accurately representing the truth?
 
theprestige said:
This seems to be more about personal hatred for Biden, than about any question of truth versus facts.

I don't mind if you want to continue your rant, but could you at least take a moment to acknowledge the problem of cherry picking versus accurately representing the truth?
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It's a post-truth world now, all that matters is "facts" by which we mean "sound bites". I urge unity over hatred! Let's agree to covfefe, bigly covfefe.
 
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A couple of things I've read recently:

Bazillionaire Tom Steyer recently hit 3% in a poll of likely Iowa caucus-goers. He needs a couple more polls like that and (ironically enough) some donors in order to get to the next debate.

Here's a pretty interesting graphic showing who's qualified and who isn't.

Fully qualified: Biden, Sanders, Warren, Buttigieg, Harris, Booker, Beto, Klobuchar and Yang. Tulsi and Castro have met the donor requirement but not the polling hurdle. The irony is that Beto is probably only in because of old polls showing him being competitive; most of the recent polling shows him at 1% or less.

Mike Gravel has officially dropped out. Here's an overly-sympathetic look at him from Vox. A few weeks ago, Marianne Williamson tried to get some donations for Gravel to help him get to the debate stage. It didn't work, and he didn't return the favor; on dropping out he endorsed Sanders.
 
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Brainster said:
A couple of things I've read recently:

Bazillionaire Tom Steyer recently hit 3% in a poll of likely Iowa caucus-goers. He needs a couple more polls like that and (ironically enough) some donors in order to get to the next debate.

Here's a pretty interesting graphic showing who's qualified and who isn't.

Fully qualified: Biden, Sanders, Warren, Buttigieg, Harris, Booker, Beto, Klobuchar and Yang. Tulsi and Castro have met the donor requirement but not the polling hurdle. The irony is that Beto is probably only in because of old polls showing him being competitive; most of the recent polling shows him at 1% or less.

Mike Gravel has officially dropped out. Here's an overly-sympathetic look at him from Vox. A few weeks ago, Marianne Williamson tried to get some donations for Gravel to help him get to the debate stage. It didn't work, and he didn't return the favor; on dropping out he endorsed Sanders.
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I'm liking Williamson more and more every day.
 
theprestige said:
I'm liking Williamson more and more every day.
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She has a few good ideas, mixed in with the rest.

It's a pity we can't select only the good ideas from each candidate and program them into an AI robot candidate (insert Al Gore joke here). That way we coukd get the best and eschew the crazy bits they each seem to harbor. Like eating only the marshmallow layer of the sweet potatoes.
 
TragicMonkey said:
She has a few good ideas, mixed in with the rest.

It's a pity we can't select only the good ideas from each candidate and program them into an AI robot candidate (insert Al Gore joke here). That way we coukd get the best and eschew the crazy bits they each seem to harbor. Like eating only the marshmallow layer of the sweet potatoes.
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Oh, that could go wrong in so many ways...
 
theprestige said:
I'm liking Williamson more and more every day.
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:rolleyes:

Is that your way of insulting the crop of Democratic candidates? Like you would seriously vote for anyone but a Republican and that means Trump as much as you deny it.
 
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Biden gaffes like 'poor kids are as smart as white kids' give the Trump campaign incredible ammo to turn blacks away from him the same way they did with Clinton. He immediately corrected himself yet what is echoing around the news media? The gaffe.

Vox
But attention around the comment had already escalated. President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign even highlighted the remarks in an email, saying, “This is not a gaffe. This is part of a pattern.” Trump has a long history of racist comments, and has repeatedly questioned the intelligence of black leaders. Biden delivered a speech in Iowa this week emphasizing the importance of the “words of a president,” calling out Trump for assigning “a moral equivalence between those spewing hate and those with the courage to stand against it.”

“As we approach the two year anniversary of Trump calling neo-Nazis and Klansmen ‘very fine people,’ Donald Trump is desperate to change the subject from his atrocious record of using racism to divide this country,” Bedingfield added.
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Desperate, sure, but let's not downplay successful.

In the room, the moment was only a blip in the nearly two-hour event, where Biden gave rambling responses to fairly straightforward questions on immigration, unions, criminal justice, climate change, and gun control.

The moderator twice asked the former vice president to be more direct in his answers — and generally talk less. At one point, Biden gave a 10-minute response to a question on criminal justice that included the standard Democratic positions on gun control, like background checks and requiring safety locks, and the geography of the Delmarva Peninsula.
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Blah blah blah, canned answers are not impressing anyone.

Biden has always been known for going off the cuff and saying things that get him into trouble (like when he waxed nostalgic about working with segregationist senators).
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Off the cuff is a polite way of saying stepped in it.

“I don’t apologize for my passion,” Biden said, defending his speaking style to the group, then closing off the event with, “You’re all thinking, ‘Joe, go the hell home’. I’m leaving.”
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WTF?
 
I figure the truth/facts thing was meant to be truth/fiction.

What's worse than the verbal bumbling about Biden is what he thinks about politics & people and what he cares about doing in that arena. For example, his latest version of his famous attack on younger adults is that what he was "really" talking about was their disinterest in politics and the fact that what they should do is not just complain about the problems that his generation dumped on them but "fix it... fix it... fix it" (because everything is more motivating & inspiration if you say it three times). Nevermind whether the number of young adults who are politically involved is actually lower now than before or not or whether the world his generation created gives them any reason to be or how haughty and judgemental it is even in this latest form... this new lie comes nowhere near the actual context in which he originally said "I have no empathy... gimme a break", nor does it backtrack from having said that... which means it's a way of functionally telling us he's sticking with it.

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I heard a commercial on the radio a few days ago that listed some examples of inflation by comparing amounts of money from today and a certain date years ago, as in "a new car was $x, a new house was $y, and a year of college was $z! And the average income was $w." I know they weren't looking at it this way, but that part of the commercial could just as easily have been in a political ad from a Democrat (the kind that actually tries to do stuff, not the cowering loser kind), because the changes they listed weren't by anywhere near the same factor: the expenses (x, y, z) were all up by a factor of at least 5 and maybe as much as 20, and w, the income with which to pay for those expenses, had only doubled.

And a guy who looks at that world and says that it's just fine, and that the people who have to deal with it complaining about it is just a problem with their character, is still #1 in a poll about Democrats? As Gropey Grandpa himself would put it, gimme a break.
 
theprestige said:
I'm liking Williamson more and more every day.
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How about her connection to Scientology?

I saw her interview with Anderson Cooper and my impression of her was that she is a nutcase. We have enough of those.
 
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