Nov 2023 Mod notice:
There may be other, more specific, threads about some aspects of US politics, but this one tends to act as a hub for all sorts of related news and information, so it's usually one of the busiest OTC threads.
If you're new to OTC, it's worth reading the Introduction to On-Topic Conversations
and the On-Topic Conversations debate guidelines
before posting here.
Rumor-based, fear-mongering and/or inflammatory statements that damage the quality of the thread will be thumped. Off-topic posts will also be thumped. Repeat offenders may be suspended.
If time spent moderating this thread remains a distraction from moderation of the wiki itself, the thread will need to be locked. We want to avoid that, so please follow the forum rules
when posting here.
In line with the general forum rules, 'gravedancing' is prohibited here. If you're celebrating someone's death or hoping that they die, your post will get thumped. This rule applies regardless of what the person you're discussing has said or done.
Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
I love the Borowitz report. That "gaffe" may have been one of the better things to happen on the stage, and underscores a fantastic dynamic so far this cycle: as long as Bernie doesn't start slinging mud, Hillary can't either without enhancing his campaign; as long as Bernie slings respect and compliments, everyone and himself to a greater degree benefits. That may change if they find a bit of mud that sticks more than the Socialist stuff he's using like red war paint, it could seem like a better idea to try to return to what's familiar and stop playing his game if the polls favor him closer to the primaries.
edited 15th Oct '15 1:05:32 AM by Artificius
"I have no fear, for fear is the little death that kills me over and over. Without fear, I die but once."
Slight digression, but the European Union was founded as one of the most noble efforts to date to bring the continent together in political and economic solidarity. It should have been a beacon of hope that the conflicts of the past were finally being redressed.
Unfortunately, a bunch of economic conservatives have gone to extreme lengths to corrupt that project, and it's looking like it may fail. The scale of the tragedy for mankind is unimaginable.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Rachel Maddow, last night, ran a segment on Rand Paul, who apparently livestreamed for an entire day and answered questions from viewers on Twitter and Facebook in an attempt to... prop up his relevance, I guess. He looked absolutely miserable. Poor Rand Paul. An anti-government misanthrope running for national office so he can get rid of the structures that allow him to continue to be elected to national office. I think he just needs a hug.
Here's a link to the segment
, if you can watch MSNBC in your region. No login should be needed.
edited 15th Oct '15 6:07:57 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Possibly. I want to see what the next round of actual - not interweb - polls say.
Hillary still has her so-called 'Southern Firewall'. Sanders basically has to crack that. Apparently their really going at it with a 'ground campaign' of activists, but that doesn't necessarily mean he'll win. I think South Carolina's primary will be decisive. If he wins Hampshire, Iowa, and then that...he might be able to roll Hillary out by momentum.
Then, of course, the real campaign will have to begin :S
Schild und Schwert der ParteiSince we're talking about how mainstream media is downplaying Bernie, Hillary donators CNN are calling him names
. Emphasis mine.
The goal will be less about creating excitement around the campaign — his advisers they feel they've largely achieved that — and is now more about convincing voters the Vermont self-described "democratic socialist" can win the nomination and the White House. "At the beginning we had to do something to create that excitement, we started from nothing," said Sanders adviser Tad Devine. "Now that we've gotten this going, we're going to move towards a period of persuasion. We've got something to work with now. Now we go and persuade voters."
This weekend, Sanders will take a two-day swing through Iowa, attending house parties, a barbeque and holding two town hall meetings. But no large rally. Even his television appearances and fundraisers will be more intimate. Sanders taped an appearance on "The Ellen De Generes Show" Wednesday night, part of the overall strategy for the campaign to introduce Sanders to a broader spectrum of voters — and show off his dancing skills.
At the first of two Beverly Hills fundraising events Wednesday evening, Sanders emphasized the difficulty of cutting through and getting his message across. "If I slipped on a banana peel leaving here it would be on the front page of the papers," Sanders said. "But when we talk about the great crisis facing this country very hard to get media attention for a lot of obvious reasons. And if I was standing here tonight and making some vicious attack against Hillary Clinton or anybody else it'd be a front page story.
"But if we talk about why the middle class is disappearing and almost all new wealth is going to the top 1 percent, not a big story," he added. "So what the political revolution is, is forcing a debate. Not about trivial, but the real issues." The appearances in Los Angeles build on the momentum of Sanders' debate fundraising success. The campaign raised roughly $2 million since Tuesday night's debate, according to Jeff Weaver, Sanders' campaign manager, with an average contribution of $30.
The overall change in strategy will bring Sanders back to how he started his campaign, when he was viewed as a fringe candidate looking to push Hillary Clinton to the left — before the excitement around him brought out thousands of people across the country.
When Sanders was just teasing a run he regularly spoke to audience of 100-200 people in Iowa, New Hampshire and elsewhere. The format allowed him deliver his stump speech and take questions from the audience. But as the fascination around his campaign grew, aides hoped to tap into that spring of excitement and throw massive events across the country. The trade-off: Sanders rarely took questions from voters or the media. The large rallies will continue, campaign strategists note, saying that they will continue doing what they see working for them.
The media always gets prickly whenever someone challenges their core narrative. It's understandable, if sort of pathetic. But Sanders is indeed running an "insurgent" campaign — one that dispenses with the traditional channels of fundraising and changes the typical message. His supporters see this as a good thing; indeed, invite the word to be used.
The more controversial Bernie's message is, the more it'll be covered. He understands something very important: it's the voters that he needs to convince, not the media, and many voters are as fed up with the media's inanity as he is.
edited 15th Oct '15 6:25:12 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I though the whole thing about him being respectfully as a gaffe was a joke. Are they seriously running with this?
Edit: After actually reading the article it is clear that they were being sarcastic.
edited 15th Oct '15 7:22:34 AM by JackOLantern1337
I Bring Doom,and a bit of gloom, but mostly gloom.You know an interesting measure that I enjoyed seeing from the first republican debate was how many twitter followers each candidate got after their debate.
How many did Clinton and Sanders get?
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothesI don't have those numbers handy, but social media was dominated by Sanders in terms of the number of tweets, number of Facebook posts, etc. He absolutely crushed everyone.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Mmm. That's interesting.
If anything, we can all recognize that barack Obama's initial online campaign was pretty novel and useful. Seems like Sanders just took it up to eleven.
And if memory serves, Obama won. Right?
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothesObama and Sanders have very strong parallels in terms of how their campaigns rode a groundswell of social media support to overtake Clinton. The Democratic race is by no means decided — it's not even close to over. What struck me most about the post-debate media coverage, as I have said before, was the shameless Clinton focus. Whether it was to tear her down or put her on a pedestal, most outlets rushed to declare her the strongest candidate in the debate, despite Sanders being the overwhelming favorite among the viewing audience.
Even Biden, who's not in the race at all, got more focus than Sanders. It's like they are deliberately punishing him for being an "outsider", possibly even for refusing donations from their own corporate parents. And isn't that a lovely conflict of interest?
edited 15th Oct '15 8:25:33 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I am just interested in those facts to see how much of it is an actually predictive measure. Just gotta wait to see what happens then.
As for the media focus, it can simply differ on who it applies to: The people who work within the media can have their own opinions, and they espouse it there. It is, at best, a difference on opinions that will change as soon as the main storymakers there are changed, at worst, we could assume some sort of under the table payment deal for free clinton publicity?
I mean, if you feel like wearing aluminum hats.
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothesIt doesn't have to be "under the table"; the media have long had implicit biases in their coverage. It becomes really apparent in cases like this, though.
What the media so often fail to take responsibility for is that their "predictive coverage" shapes public opinion by its very nature, so when they call Clinton the winner, it moves the polls in a measurable way. They aren't supposed to create news; they are supposed to report on it.
edited 15th Oct '15 8:31:47 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Bias is different from "financial benefits" tho.
Maybe they are trying to chastise Sanders in that way, maybe it is just a coincidence. Money is a strong mobile so while I am tempted to be inclined there, I would prefer to shrug my shoulders and see what happens in the end.
The race has just begun, after all.
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes

Doorstopper as page topper. Go me!
So following the Dem debate, Bernie won according to all the focus groups
but Hillary won according to all the media.
Bernie Sanders by all objective measures "won" the debate. Hands down. I don’t say this as a personal analysis of the debate; the very idea of "winning" a debate is silly to me. I say this because based on the only relatively objective metric we have, online polls and focus groups, he did win. And it’s not even close.
Sanders won the CNN focus group, the Fusion focus group, and the Fox News focus group; in the latter, he even converted several Hillary supporters. He won the Slate online poll, CNN/Time online poll, 9News Colorado, The Street online poll, Fox5 poll, the conservative Drudge online poll and the liberal Daily Kos online poll. There wasn’t, to this writer's knowledge, a poll he didn’t win by at least an 18-point margin. But you wouldn’t know this from reading the establishment press. The New York Times, the New Yorker, CNN, Politico, Slate, New York Magazine, and Vox all unanimously say Hillary Clinton cleaned house. What gives?
Firstly, it’s important to point out that online polls, and to a lesser extent focus groups, are obviously not scientific. But it’s also important to point out that the echo chamber musings of establishment liberal pundits is far, far less scientific. It wasn’t that the online polls and focus groups had Sanders winning, it’s that they had him winning by a lot. And it wasn’t just that the pundit class has Clinton winning, it’s that they had her winning by a lot. This gap speaks to a larger gap we’ve seen since the beginning of the Sanders campaign. The mainstream media writes off Bernie and is constantly shocked when his polls numbers go up. What explains this phenomenon? Freddie De Boer had this to say:
This morning, I’ve been pointing out on Twitter that the unanimity of pro-Hillary Clinton journalism coming from the mouthpieces of establishment Democratic politics — Slate, Vox, New York Magazine, etc. — is entirely predictable and has no meaningful relationship to her actual performance at the debate last night. That’s because, one, the Democrats are a centrist party that is interested in maintaining the stranglehold of the DNC establishment on their presidential politics, and these publications toe that line. And second, because Clinton has long been assumed to be the heavy favorite to win the presidency, these publications are in a heated battle to produce the most sympathetic coverage, in order to gain access. That is a tried-and-true method of career advancement in political journalism. Ezra Klein was a well-regarded blogger and journalist. He became the most influential journalist in DC (and someone, I can tell you with great confidence, that young political journalists are terrified of crossing) through his rabid defense of Obamacare, and subsequent access to the President. That people would try and play the same role with Clinton is as natural and unsurprising as I can imagine.
Many establishment journalists were in a hurry to declare Clinton not just the winner of the debate, but of the party nomination. One fairly creepy exchange between Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker and Alec Mac Gillis summed it up nicely:
Ryan Lizza: Hillary Clinton won because all of her opponents are terrible.
Alec Mac Gillis: @Ryan Lizza Exactly. It's time for this to be admitted and to stop pretending there is a race.
"Pretend" there's a race? Isn't that sort of the whole point of democracy? To have as much debate and vetting as possible before nominating a potential leader of the free world? Matt Yglesias at Vox also dismissed this entire primary process out of hand:
Clinton's greatest achievement in the 2015 primary hasn't been anything she's done against the candidates running against her. It's been preventing other, more formidable politicians from running against her at all. These four guys simply aren't close to being the second, third, fourth, and fifth most serious alternatives to Clinton that the Democratic Party has to offer - and it showed.
It's unclear what the rush is. The first primary is months away, yet they're ready to call it based entirely on an ad hoc analysis of one debate. This tweet by Michael Cohen of the Boston Globe perfectly sums up mainstream media's cluelessness:
Bernie Sanders is all piss and vinegar. Too much anger; too much rancor. Works as a protest candidate, but not as national candidate.
A "protest candidate"? If Cohen hasn't noticed, the electorate is full of piss and vinegar and rancor, which is precisely why an otherwise obscure, self-described Socialist has risen in the polls the way he has.
But the question still remains: why the rush to write off Sanders? Why the constant gap between how the public perceives Sanders and how the mainstream media does? Why, most of all, would anyone listen to the very same pundit class that was wrong in '08 and continues to be wrong in 2015?
Calling it a gaffe of historic proportions, many political insiders were still scratching their heads Wednesday morning over Sanders’s bizarre decision to act toward his opponent as if she were a fellow human being.
“I chalk it up to pressure,” the political strategist Harland Dorrinson said. “Sanders has never been on such a big stage before, and in the heat of the moment he cracked and behaved with nobility.”
“It was one of those moments where everyone in politics was like, ‘What was he thinking?’ ” Dorrinson added.
Carol Foyler, a veteran political operative, said that Sanders has one more debate, “at the most,” to prove that his respect gaffe was just that—a regrettable but forgivable slip of the tongue, not to be repeated.
“Bernie Sanders’s behavior towards Hillary Clinton Tuesday night has raised some grave questions about him in voters’ minds,” Foyler said. “If he treats people with decency and civility now, what kind of President would he be?”
And now for six pages of posts to reply to ...
edited 15th Oct '15 12:39:40 AM by BlueNinja0
That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw