FlamingLiberal posted:

Biden doesn't actually care about forgiving student debt and the admin clearly places a higher priority on 'the economy is perfectly fine! don't look behind you!' -type messaging over actually doing something to help his voters

Mellow Seas posted:

If you simply reject the premise that Democrats winning elections is better than Republicans winning elections, then no, there’s no reason for you to care.

The popularity or unpopularity of Biden’s decisions affects every competitive election in the country.

JonathonSpectre posted:

Which is why I'm currently reading up on how to become a Taoist wizard. Get yourself a strip of yellow cloth and let's get ready to surprise everyone.

JonathonSpectre posted:

Fatuous lords will always find a reason they're going to lose and can't even fight, in fact not fighting is actually the smart and brave option!

We need Liu Bei and instead we have 535 Yuan brothers. Half of them dilettante cowards and half of them hoping to just hold on until everyone else has magically died and they win by default. Look I know the Empire is collapsing but... what about my treasures and position?

BTW we're at the part of the story now where we're just waiting to see what group of bandits seizes the Mandate of Heaven after the Empire collapses.

Which is why I'm currently reading up on how to become a Taoist wizard. Get yourself a strip of yellow cloth and let's get ready to surprise everyone.

Fister Roboto posted:

I'm only concerned with Dems winning elections as a means to an end, not as an end unto itself. If they refuse to do good things because they're worried about losing elections, then they're being entirely self-serving. I'm not going to get into the millionth rehash of the "but the Republicans are worse!!!" argument.

JonathonSpectre posted:

Fatuous lords will always find a reason they're going to lose and can't even fight, in fact not fighting is actually the smart and brave option!

We need Liu Bei and instead we have 535 Yuan brothers. Half of them dilettante cowards and half of them hoping to just hold on until everyone else has magically died and they win by default. Look I know the Empire is collapsing but... what about my treasures and position?

BTW we're at the part of the story now where we're just waiting to see what group of bandits seizes the Mandate of Heaven after the Empire collapses.

Which is why I'm currently reading up on how to become a Taoist wizard. Get yourself a strip of yellow cloth and let's get ready to surprise everyone.

BIG FLUFFY DOG posted:

it's also correct in the spirit if not the letter as the plot of the movie is Rambo going to afghanistan to join the mujaheideen

PeterCat posted:

Anyway, people should read the original novel, First Blood. Rambo hunts and kills a bunch of sheriff's deputies like he's the Predator, and Trautman is not seen as a kindly mentor in any way.

FLIPADELPHIA posted:

The original cut of First Blood had Trautman blowing Rambo's head off at Rambo's own request (Trautman was happy to do it)

quote:

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- A local activist and columnist has been arrested in connection with firing a shot directly at a Louisville mayoral candidate.

On Monday night, Louisville Metro Police announced Quintez Brown, 21, was arrested and charged with attempted murder after he allegedly fired shots into Craig Greenberg's campaign office on Monday morning. He is also facing four counts of first-degree wanton endangerment.

Police responded to the report of shots fired Monday morning at the Butchertown Market at 1201 Story Avenue, where Greenberg's campaign has an office.

Greenberg was not hit by a bullet, but a round hit his clothing, according to Louisville Metro Police Chief Erika Shields.

"All of us are blessed, and I'm blessed to be standing here today with you. Despite one bullet coming so close that it grazed my sweater and my shirt, no one was physically harmed and we are extraordinarily grateful for our safety," Greenberg said. "We are shaken, but safe."

Police say they took Brown into custody outside of Butchertown Market. Shields said his motive remains under investigation and it appears that he acted alone.

Brown, who is currently running as a independent candidate for Louisville Metro Council District 5, went missing for 11 days last summer.

When Brown was found last summer, no further information was released from police.

"We are asking for privacy and would appreciate everyone's patience and support while we tend to the most immediate need, which is Quintez's physical, mental and spiritual health," the statement from Cecilia Brown and Jacobe Daughterty said in July 2021.

Brown, who has been active with Black Lives Matter Louisville and the University of Louisville's Youth Violence Prevention Research Center, spoke to WDRB News in June of 2020 after demonstrating in downtown Louisville daily to voice his frustrations with how black people have been policed throughout the country.

A report by The Courier Journal in 2021 said he worked as an intern for the newspaper and has been a frequent contributor to the outlet's opinion section.

He also spoke out in 2019 about his discomfort with armed police serving as school resource officers in Jefferson County Public Schools.

This story may be updated.

FLIPADELPHIA posted:

Thank you for posting this - I've seen this a hundred times and always assumed it was legit.

kdrudy posted:

So the true winner of this tumultuous time isn't even on anybodies radar yet?

AmiYumi posted:

Aren’t both of those real? I thought they edited and then removed the message on different home releases as it became politically inconvenient.

PeterCat posted:

nine-gear crow posted:

Seriously, I want to take this picture back to like September of 1980 and run it on national television just saying "This is image is from 40 years in the future. This is what electing Ronald Reagan leads to. Good luck, America." and see what happens.

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

What? Seriously? The US Consumer Safety Commission has a fandom in the furry community and has publicly acknowledged it?

nine-gear crow posted:

Seriously, I want to take this picture back to like September of 1980 and run it on national television just saying "This is image is from 40 years in the future. This is what electing Ronald Reagan leads to. Good luck, America." and see what happens.

FlamingLiberal posted:

Biden doesn't actually care about forgiving student debt and the admin clearly places a higher priority on 'the economy is perfectly fine! don't look behind you!' -type messaging over actually doing something to help his voters

quote:

The left neutralizes the Dem establishment in Pa. Senate primary

Conor Lamb is the kind of swing-state Senate candidate who used to make Democratic power-brokers swoon.

A former Marine and prosecutor, Lamb catapulted onto the national scene in 2018 when he flipped a House seat that former President Donald Trump carried by nearly 20 points. President Joe Biden said the young, centrist lawmaker reminds him of his late son, Beau.

Yet for all his pedigree as a battleground state candidate, Lamb remains mired in the Democratic primary for Pennsylvania’s open Senate seat, trailing progressive frontrunner Lt. Gov. John Fetterman in both fundraising and the polls. Even more surprising: The party establishment hasn’t swooped in to help Lamb, despite the fact that Democratic leaders have aggressively recruited candidates with a profile like his to run for Senate in the past.

Lamb’s predicament offers a window into how much the Democratic Party has changed in recent years: Progressives have gained a major foothold, small-dollar fundraising has upended election dynamics, and moderate white men like Lamb are no longer shoo-ins.

“I think it probably has to do with not wanting to wade in and anger the progressive base, because Democrats need a progressive base to turn out,” said Mike Mikus, a Democratic strategist who is a veteran of Senate and House campaigns in Pennsylvania. “I understand why they’re staying out. It can cause a lot of headaches with various constituent groups as well.”

The primary is just getting started — no Democratic candidate has even aired a television ad yet. Lamb’s campaign argues that he has a strong case to make to Democratic voters that he is the most electable candidate in one of the premier Senate races in the country. His team remains convinced Fetterman has major liabilities that will sink him once they become widely known.

In an interview, Lamb downplayed Fetterman’s strengths in the primary.

“Polling is nowhere near as reliable as people like him make it out to be, particularly this early in a race, so many months before so many people have learned much about us or made up their minds. So in my opinion, the score is 0-0 and the entire game is left to be played,” he said, adding, “If online fundraising was what determined these elections, you’d have either Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump as the president.”

In sketching out his path to victory, Lamb said he can bring together both voters from western Pennsylvania, his home base, and the populous southeastern part of the state, where he has won endorsements from top elected officials and labor groups such as Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney and the city’s powerful building trades.


“I knew I could appeal in both Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and right now I’m the only candidate doing that,” he said. “We’re picking up steam out here because these people want a winner, and at the end of the day, what sets me apart from every other candidate in this race is that I have won very high-pressure, difficult campaigns against Republicans.”

To convince voters of that, Lamb will first need to introduce himself to them. Despite receiving national attention for his 2018 congressional victory, Lamb is not widely known outside of western Pennsylvania. Fetterman, the only candidate in the Democratic field who has run and won statewide, is leading in public and private polls. Last year, Fetterman also raised nearly $12 million from a massive network of small-dollar donors, compared to $4 million for Lamb.

In some internal surveys, Lamb has been virtually tied with state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, who would be the first openly gay and Black senator in Pennsylvania if successful. Kenyatta collected only $1.5 million in 2021, but has received endorsements from groups such as the American Federation of Teachers, Working Families Party and SEIU Pennsylvania.

Mustafa Rashed, a Philadelphia-based Democratic consultant, said that Pennsylvania already has “the quintessential white male moderate” in the Senate, Democrat Bob Casey, which might make primary voters more willing to take a chance on a different kind of candidate.

“Pennsylvania has sent however many white men to the United States Senate since the start of the commonwealth’s founding,” said Rashed, who is not working for any campaign in the Senate primary. “And we’ve mostly gotten the same thing out of that. The fired-up part of the Democratic Party thinks we can get a different outcome if we sent a different kind of person there.”

Both Lamb and Fetterman are white men. A white woman who had been running in the primary, Montgomery County Commissioner Val Arkoosh, dropped out earlier this month. EMILY’s List, a powerful group that supports women who champion abortion rights, had been backing her.

Fully aware of the need to appeal to Black voters, Lamb has been aggressively courting African American elected officials and labor leaders. In Philadelphia, Ryan Boyer, the head of the city’s building trades, who is Black, is a top supporter.

But Lamb’s efforts to prove that he is the best candidate to take on Fetterman in the primary — and the eventual Republican nominee in the fall — haven’t always been successful. At a recent meeting, the Pennsylvania Democratic Party declined to endorse anyone in the Senate primary, a setback for Lamb. While he won a majority of votes from committee members, he failed to meet the threshold necessary to win the party nod.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has also stayed out of the contest so far, likely to the detriment of Lamb. That’s a turnaround from previous election cycles, when Democrats in Washington often sought to avoid competitive, resource-depleting Senate primaries by hand-picking candidates. In the race for this same seat in Pennsylvania in 2016, the DSCC recruited Katie McGinty and officially endorsed her.

“We’re keeping open lines of communications with all of the candidates, we’re assessing the campaigns, and we’re working to build the infrastructure for the general election,” said Patrick Burgwinkle, senior communications strategist for the DSCC. “We haven’t issued endorsements in any challenger races — yet — but we are not taking anything off the table.”

Mikus, who served as McGinty’s campaign manager in 2016, said the DSCC weighing in could “get messy,” particularly a time when Democrats are gladly watching the candidates in the state’s GOP primary tear into each other.

“Malcolm is the only African American candidate. Fetterman has got kind of the Bernie base,” he said. “Especially when you have a Republican primary [that is] so messy right now, you don’t want to throw mud on yourself when the other party’s doing it to themselves.”

Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, who has not endorsed a candidate in the primary, said he does not expect DSCC to ultimately get involved. He attributed that to the fact that Fetterman and Lamb are “two fairly strong candidates, number one. And number two, I believe the argument that Lamb may be the best candidate to win in the fall, but the polls haven’t shown anything like that yet.”

One of the major benefits of having the DSCC’s backing — whether explicit or implicit — is fundraising. Lamb’s allies are confident that he will raise enough money to compete with Fetterman regardless, though. And a Lamb campaign aide said, “As long as the DSCC is not closing doors to us for fundraising or for support or things like that, then that’s fine. Obviously, it would be better if they were opening those doors, but as long as they’re not closing them … we can work with that.”

A recent development could help Lamb close the money gap with Fetterman: A pro-Lamb super PAC, which is looking to raise more than $8 million, has emerged. A document promoting the group listed the firm founded by Biden’s pollster, John Anzalone, as part of the team.

James Carville, the longtime Democratic strategist, boosted the pro-Lamb super PAC in a recent email to potential donors. He said Democrats must win Pennsylvania’s Senate seat to keep control of the chamber, and Lamb is the surest bet in the general election.

“I don’t think Pennsylvania Democrats are looking to the DSCC particularly for guidance,” he told POLITICO. “I don’t think the lack of involvement on the part of the DSCC is very significant at all.”

Lamb’s campaign believes that Fetterman has not yet been properly vetted in the crucible of a tough campaign, and is coasting on name ID. As one weakness, they point to the fact that Fetterman once pulled a shotgun on a person he thought might be involved in a shooting, but who turned out to be an unarmed Black jogger. Fetterman has said he did not know the race of the man.

Lamb’s opponents, in turn, think that his record as a moderate makes him unacceptable to many Democrats, particularly at a time when centrist Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) have drawn the ire of the party base for stymying Biden’s agenda. They believe the Lamb’s voting record — the congressman voted in line with Trump’s position 68 percent of the time during his first eight months in office, according to the website FiveThirty Eight — is poison. Lamb’s campaign argues that’s a cherry-picked statistic, since the same data shows he voted with Trump overall only 22 percent of the time.

Elaine Giarrusso, a liberal activist in western Pennsylvania who has supported Lamb since his 2018 run, said he can win over progressives in the Senate primary “simply because he listens to them and does not rule anything out.”

She added, “A lot of progressives are realizing that we are something of a minority and that it’s better to not push for and expect to get everything you want, and lose a general election.”

Ultimately, Lamb is making a bet that voters will care more about the ability to win in a general election than pass any ideological litmus test. In essence, he wants to do what Biden did in the 2020 presidential primary. Lamb’s success will depend, in part, on whether he can paint Fetterman, who won on Gov. Tom Wolf’s ticket in 2018 and is not a self-described socialist, as unelectable as Bernie Sanders.

“I still believe that our party is going to make a decision in this race, like they did in 2020, about who has the best chance of actually winning in November and getting to the Senate,” Lamb said. “Even when it looks like Twitter and other things are so important.”

Mellow Seas posted:

- Biden would be accused of not supporting the military, which is the most popular institution in the country. Some people would find that persuasive.

FlamingLiberal posted:

Dr Oz figured out the Trump Cheat Code- just be a TV personality and you can win a GOP primary no problem

FlamingLiberal posted:

Dr Oz figured out the Trump Cheat Code- just be a TV personality and you can win a GOP primary no problem

FlamingLiberal posted:

I don’t think he wins the general

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

I'm not really sure what people are arguing about with the military budget anymore. Other than some abstract concept that the President doesn't decide the budget.

Lib and let die posted:

(with regard to Ukraine, most specificall the "I" part of that, since we're not going to war, just warming another country to wage theirs in the hopes we'll get a killer deal on importing resources)

Lib and let die posted:

Imma stop you right there.

Can people just express discontent without having to make a broader point?

What would you, specifically, Leon, like to see out of posters like myself decrying the ludicrous amounts of money that get thrown at the MIC (with regard to Ukraine, most specificall the "I" part of that, since we're not going to war, just warming another country to wage theirs in the hopes we'll get a killer deal on importing resources) when we can't even care for our citizens at home? It's a controversial topic, and I certainly don't plan to highlight the lassez-faire attitude our government has towards MIC spending when it insists that we have to tighten our belts domestically.

Weapons coming out of our stock means POs go out to Lockheed Martin and Boeing and Northrop Grumman to replace our/NATOs stockpiles, those companies make money on those purchase orders, and then in 10 years Ukraine separatists will be using the same weapons we sent over there to conduct operations against US forces across Europe, meanwhile President Manchin will have vetoed medicare for all or a UBI dozens of times during the first year of his term.

The entire Ukraine situation is performative of exactly where the values of our government lie - and it's not in lifting up the common citizen.

Willa Rogers posted:

Maybe that'll be the re-entry method for Al Franken, given his recent foray into testing the me-too waters to see if they're any warmer than they were when he resigned.

Mellow Seas posted:

It's not "", it's not some pedantic point, it's not spin or "Demsplaining," we are literally, unquestionably not going to war, and the people who are posting as if the situation was otherwise are wasting everybody's time.

RBA Starblade posted:

It took a while to get there, but I'm glad we're all finally on the same page regarding the US going to war with Russia or not.

Lib and let die posted:

This does not advance a conversation or a meaningful transfer of ideas- it frustrates it - by design.

Lib and let die posted:

Imma stop you right there.

Can people just express discontent without having to make a broader point?

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

Yes, but I'm talking about Vox and other people trying to discern what % of the military budget Biden truly wanted in his heart vs. just looking at what he signed and proposed. Yes, he didn't write the final budget, but he did sign it without much complaint. It seems like it started with a pedantic defense of Biden because he technically didn't write the budget since only Congress can and has sort of spun off into metaphysical debates about what percentage of responsibility each individual member of Congress and Biden hold based on what they "really" wanted.

Lib and let die posted:

Right, we're not going to war. We're just helping Ukraine wage theirs, by equipping them with rockets that cost $175,000 every time one gets fired. We did this overnight, at the behest of a nation with a vast and rich availability of mineral resources to be exploited, and people are dying and starving in the streets at home.

What do you gain by ing over if we're spending money "going to" war or "financing a" war?

I won't accuse you of doing it with intent - I think you're better than that - but you're unintentionally bogging down any meaningful talk with tactics literally out of the CIA playbook:

https://www.hsdl.org/?abstract&did=750070

This does not advance a conversation or a meaningful transfer of ideas- it frustrates it - by design.

Lib and let die posted:

Yeah, we're sending everything but the troops - coincidentally, we're sending all the parts that cost the most and generate purchase orders for arms manufacturers to resupply our reserves with!

I fail to see a meaningful difference.