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2020 Presidential Election 2: The Primaries are upon us


GreyhoundFan

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3 hours ago, Pecansforeveryone said:

I really like Tulsi Gabbard. She has spoken so passionately about the need to stop regime change wars and has the combat experience to back it up. She's 100% correct that our foreign policy touches every aspect of our domestic policy  from areas like healthcare and education to the environment. 

Fuck Tulsi Gabbard and her "present" impeachment vote. That tells me all I need to know about her, spineless cult bitch. 

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6 hours ago, SilverBeach said:

Fuck Tulsi Gabbard and her "present" iminvestigative-series-on-the-science-of-identity-sect-and-tulsi-gabbard cult bitch. 

While I personally wouldn't use the harsh strong language you used , I absolutely agree that Tulsi Gabbard has continued to be in the cult that she was born and raised in .  @Pecansforeveryone  probably doesn't know of this though , so I do not automatically fault them .  But for everyone's information , here is information on the cult in question , and Tulsi Gabbard's ties to it .  https://ramaransonvsthecult.wordpress.com/2015/09/29/tulsi-gabbard-cult-born-and-raised/  ,  https://www.meanwhileinhawaii.org/home/investigative-series-on-the-science-of-identity-sect-and-tulsi-gabbard  And in addition , if she were to be the nominee , which I rather doubt , these would be the type of attack ads we could all expect .  It's pretty bad when any Democrat can be portrayed as being as at least as extreme as Donald Trump in her own way , but that is the reputation she has garnered .  

 

 

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31 minutes ago, Marmion said:

While I personally wouldn't use the harsh strong language you used

Then don't! Not sure why you found it necessary to make this comment. It sounds a little handslappy. I would hope you wouldn't use my language, you're not me. I don't fuck around when it comes to even implied support for that orange bastard. I have lived in fear since Nov. 2016 and like many Americans am traumatized by the ongoing horror. No apologies coming, you do you and I'll do me. Besides, many of us on FJ like to cuss when appropriate. Some of us just like to cuss, and that's OK too!

31 minutes ago, Marmion said:

I absolutely agree that Tulsi Gabbard has continued to be in the cult that she was born and raised in .  @Pecansforeveryone  probably doesn't know of this though , so I do not automatically fault them .

I wasn't faulting her.  Geez.

31 minutes ago, Marmion said:

Fuck Tulsi Gabbard and her "present" iminvestigative-series-on-the-science-of-identity-sect-and-tulsi-gabbard cult bitch.

This wording was attributed to me but it is not at all what I posted.

Edited by SilverBeach
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10 minutes ago, Marmion said:

While I personally wouldn't use the harsh strong language you used

Fwiw I don't think there is language harsh enough for someone who voted "present" on impeachment.

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I've been wondering what the deal was with Tulsi. I remember hearing about her in 2016 and somewhat liking her, but now all I heard was "she's a republican in democrats clothing" and other vague "we hate her now" generalities. Her platform doesn't seem to be anything that's not similar to candidates that are already running. I like that she's anti-war.

But then the "present" made no sense and now I'm hearing that she's a Russian asset. She's not polling high enough for me to really bother doing too much digging into her, so thanks for the links upthread!

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Even if this so-called feud between Warren and Sanders is true, they both, together with Biden and Klobuchar, show that real American issues are more important than any real or perceived personal differences. Together, they marched today in solidarity and unity. 

 

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It's not true. It's just a way for CNN to boost its ratings for its sham of a debate. I really want a series of REAL debates, run by people who only care about the integrity of the country, rule of law, and issues that we face. Not ratings or what is best for the future of  "the party."

2 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Even if this so-called feud between Warren and Sanders is true, they both, together with Biden and Klobuchar, show that real American issues are more important than any real or perceived personal differences. Together, they marched today in solidarity and unity.

 

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On 1/19/2020 at 8:37 PM, SilverBeach said:

Then don't! Not sure why you found it necessary to make this comment. It sounds a little handslappy. I would hope you wouldn't use my language, you're not me. I don't fuck around when it comes to even implied support for that orange bastard. I have lived in fear since Nov. 2016 and like many Americans am traumatized by the ongoing horror. No apologies coming, you do you and I'll do me. Besides, many of us on FJ like to cuss when appropriate. Some of us just like to cuss, and that's OK too!

I wasn't faulting her.  Geez.

This wording was attributed to me but it is not at all what I posted.

I wasn't setting out to chastise you . I just didn't want it to seem as if I was fully endorsing your remarks , although I completely agree with the expressed sentiment .  I didn't say that you were faulting her . And lastly , my tablet must have messed up the quote by posting the link I was trying to post in my reply in the wrong place .  A technical error , that's all it was .  

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On 1/20/2020 at 8:37 PM, Marmion said:

I wasn't setting out to chastise you . I just didn't want it to seem as if I was fully endorsing your remarks , although I completely agree with the expressed sentiment .  I didn't say that you were faulting her . And lastly , my tablet must have messed up the quote by posting the link I was trying to post in my reply in the wrong place .  A technical error , that's all it was .  

Quoting someone does not mean you are endorsing their remarks, fully or otherwise. I still feel like your comment was uncalled for.  It's apparent there was some kind of error, I just like to be quoted correctly and will point out when I'm not, for whatever reason. 

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"As candidates fight, Democrats fear a rupture that will help President Trump"

Spoiler

AMES, Iowa — On Tuesday, when Democrats had hoped to focus Americans squarely on President Trump’s impeachment trial, many in the party were instead watching in alarm and dismay as a fresh spat erupted between Hillary Clinton and the candidate she defeated in 2016, Sen. Bernie Sanders.

In comments published early Tuesday, Clinton left open the possibility that she might not support Sanders if he is the party’s nominee. The remarks unleashed fresh angst less than two weeks before the Iowa caucuses amid a flurry of other attacks dividing the presidential candidates and their allies.

Sanders (I-Vt.) has been engaged in battles with rivals on various fronts over the past week — squabbling with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) over whether he once said a woman could not be president, attacking former vice president Joe Biden with an out-of-context video about Social Security and issuing a rare apology after a top surrogate called Biden corrupt.

The conflicts have reignited Democratic fears that, whoever becomes the nominee, the party will rupture as it did four years ago, when divisions between the Clinton and Sanders camps marred the primaries and the summer convention, and were blamed by many for contributing to her loss to Trump that November.

“Nobody wants to re-litigate 2016. I don’t want Democrats focused on the last campaign; I want to focus on the next campaign,” said Terry McAuliffe, the former Virginia governor and former head of the Democratic National Committee. “People have to check their attacks. We can’t get in the mud pit where Donald Trump wants to be. Let’s not be playing on his turf.”

“If Bernie is the nominee,” he added, “everyone has to rally.”

Rebecca Katz, a liberal New York-based consultant, put the blame squarely on Clinton.

“This is bringing up old wounds,” Katz said. “It’s four years later, and the nominee in 2016 is not saying for certain whether they are going to support the nominee in 2020? That is unacceptable.”

Katz added: “This is Hillary Clinton. She had to know how explosive these remarks would be. And she did it anyway. And she did it now.”

“There’s enough post-traumatic stress out there already,” said former senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif). “I think it’s best if we just move forward. But everybody has a right to say what’s in their heart.” She added that the one benefit of the intensifying primary is it allows voters to see battle-tested candidates, saying, “Whatever they are getting now they’re going to get 10 times worse in the general.”

Clinton’s comments, published just hours before Democrats began to make their case on impeachment in Washington and as several candidates launched a full day of campaigning here in Iowa, came in an interview promoting a documentary about her that will premiere at Sundance Film Festival on Saturday.

In the film, she offered a blunt assessment of Sanders, casting him as a career politician who has deceived his supporters into believing he could implement change.

“He was in Congress for years,” she said. “. . . Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney, and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.”

When asked in the interview with the Hollywood Reporter if that assessment still held, she responded, “Yes, it does.” Asked if she would support him if he won the nomination, she demurred, saying, “I’m not going to go there yet. We’re still in a very vigorous primary season. ”

She also criticized the willingness of his supporters to antagonize his political rivals.

It’s “not only him, it’s the culture around him,” she said. “It’s his leadership team. It’s his prominent supporters. It’s his online Bernie Bros and their relentless attacks on lots of his competitors, particularly the women. And I really hope people are paying attention to that because it should be worrisome that he has permitted this culture — not only permitted, [he] seems to really be very much supporting it. And I don’t think we want to go down that road again where you campaign by insult and attack and maybe you try to get some distance from it, but you either don’t know what your campaign and supporters are doing or you’re just giving them a wink.”

The comments triggered an outburst of criticism that flew across social media. Tommy Vietor, a former aide to President Barack Obama, tweeted that Clinton’s comments were “inexcusable” and the entire party needed to get behind the nominee, Sanders or not.

“Don’t kick up this . . . right before Iowa, especially after complaining about Bernie’s lack of support in 2016,” he wrote, noting that he was “TERRIFIED” about the party not being united in the general election.

A Clinton spokesman, Nick Merrill, responded to say that Clinton isn’t committing to any candidate in the primary and pointed to her record of working for Democrats, including former opponents like Obama.

“Let’s all take a deep breath, give her the benefit of the doubt for once, & look at history,” he wrote on Twitter.

Clinton late Tuesday mocked the hubbub she had created and seemed to suggest support for Sanders if he is the nominee.

“I thought everyone wanted my authentic, unvarnished views!” she tweeted. “But to be serious, the number one priority for our country and world is retiring Trump, and, as I always have, I will do whatever I can to support our nominee.”

Clinton’s comments seemed to feed into a growing concern among more-moderate and establishment Democrats that Sanders, an enduring and energetic force if a polarizing one, could damage the party if he captured the nomination. Others, however, worried that the convulsion could further alienate Sanders’s supporters, many of whom believe the 2016 race was stacked against him and fear the same happening in 2020.

“No one loves Hillary Clinton more than I do, but those remarks are not helpful,” said Ed Rendell, the former Pennsylvania governor. “Whoever wins, we have to get behind them. There’s no time this year for Democrats to resolve old grievances.”

Jen Psaki, a veteran Democratic consultant and former top Obama aide, said that it was clear Clinton “hasn’t buried the hatchet, and she needs to bury the hatchet.”

“There are a number of things that can simultaneously be true,” she said. “One, she shouldn’t have said it; two, it represents the view of many Democrats; and, three, he’s always been underestimated.”

The Sanders style of campaigning has increasingly grated on Biden and his campaign, who view his tactics as unfair and out of bounds. Sanders’s campaign aides promoted an out-of-context video of Biden that suggested he agreed with the proposals of then-House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) to cut Social Security. Sanders said over the weekend that he wished they had shown the fuller context but stood by his criticisms of other comments by Biden on entitlements.

On Monday, a top Sanders ally wrote an op-ed saying that “Biden has a big corruption problem and it makes him a weak candidate.” Sanders apologized for the critique.

Some Democrats lamented that Sanders has not faced enough scrutiny, even as he has been repeatedly underestimated by some party leaders.

“What Hillary is saying is a general concern I have and a lot of other people have, too,” said Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), a former presidential candidate who has endorsed Biden. “Socialism and taking away people’s private health care and, you know, all these things that make it very very difficult to beat Donald Trump in the industrial states we need to win. Hillary knows that better than anybody, how hard that is. To me, she’s articulating a concern that a lot of us have.”

Besides his squabbles with Biden, Sanders also has exchanged barbs with Warren over her claim that Sanders told her during a private 2018 meeting that a woman wouldn’t defeat Trump — a claim Sanders has denied. The disagreement spilled onto the presidential debate stage last week.

Although the disagreements left some Democrats quaking, others found a bright side.

“I love it,” said Bakari Sellers, a former state legislator from South Carolina. “Politics is a contact sport. Unfortunately, Democrats think politics is tiddlywinks, which is why we got drummed by Donald Trump, who plays by no rules. We have to get tougher.”

He added: “Who is anyone to say Hillary Clinton can’t say whatever the hell she wants to say? It’s clear she has a visceral disdain for Bernie Sanders.

“The debate is invigorating,” he said. “Nothing is out of bounds.”

Other Democratic presidential candidates sought to gain advantage through comparison. The super PAC supporting Biden saw an opening to distinguish its candidate, releasing a new ad called “The Storm” that shows choppy ocean waters amid text that reads, “Joe Biden. A President to Right the Ship,” and says he’s “The Democrat Who Can Lead Through the Storm.”

Former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg, who has campaigned as someone who can turn the page on controversies of the past, reiterated that argument.

“I didn’t love going through the experience of our party divisions in the past,” Buttigieg said in response to questions about Clinton. “I’m focused now on making sure that the future is better.”

Until the recent battling, the 2020 race has been tame by comparison to 2016 — a fact that some held on to.

“In the immediate short term, all of these soap-operatic outbursts are a distraction,” said Robert Zimmerman, a top donor and DNC member from New York. “Do I think it’s going to prevent us from being united? I don’t think so. But we have to be very disciplined about it. Because it wouldn’t be the first time we saw a fight get out of control.”

In Iowa, a representative of those mostly too young to take part in the past disputes demanded that her elders cease the current ones.

“Everyone stop fighting about 2016 please thanks!!!!!!!!!!!!! No need for that!!!!!!!!!!! Our President is literally on trial right now!!!!!!!!! Focus on 2020!!!!!!!! Thank you!!!!!!!!!!” tweeted Olivia Habinck, president of the College and Young Democrats of Iowa.

 

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Don't worry. No matter what the media says, she's firmly behind "vote blue, no matter who".

 

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Why do we care what Hillary thinks, anyway? Her supporters were SO annoying last election, and she lost. She's retired.

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She is certainly entitled to her opinion, but I thought her comments about Bernie were a massive mistake. Democrats with influence should be so vocal about supporting whoever the democratic candidate is to motivate their "followers" to vote Trump out of office - that should be the number one priority. I'm glad she decided to make a public statement indicating she would do that. 

Pod Save America spoke about this in great detail on their podcast this week. 

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1 hour ago, Maggie Mae said:

Why do we care what Hillary thinks, anyway? Her supporters were SO annoying last election, and she lost. She's retired.

She'll never fully retire.  IMO she's doing shit like this to get people to beg her to come back and run again.  Which, if it happens...someone help me move to another country because I'd be fucking done.

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First the comment came from a documentary. She will still support Bernie if he ends up being the nominee but he won't. Why would she say she supports Bernie if he isn't the nominee? The primaries haven't even officially happened. The biggest block of supporters were Black women with close to 90% voting for her in 2016, so whoever ends up winning the nomination needs the support of Black women the most (white women educated and Black men are runner ups).

 

Also Bernie literally just had a clip with the New York Times saying how he doesn't get along with people and doesn't care to so....

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"Tulsi Gabbard sues Hillary Clinton for $50M, claims defamation over 'Russian asset' remark"

Spoiler

Democratic presidential candidate Rep. Tulsi Gabbard filed a defamation lawsuit Wednesday against Hillary Clinton seeking $50 million in damages, claiming the former Democratic presidential nominee "carelessly and recklessly impugned" her reputation when she suggested in October that one of the 2020 Democratic candidates is "the favorite of the Russians."

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, says it aims to hold Clinton and other "political elites" accountable for "distorting the truth in the middle of a critical Presidential election." It also says Gabbard suffered an economic loss to be proven at trial.

Clinton's spokesman, Nick Merrill, responded: "That's ridiculous."

Gabbard, a dark horse candidate who represents Hawaii, was on the campaign trail Wednesday and unavailable for comment about the suit, according to her law firm, Pierce Bainbridge Beck Price & Hecht LLP.

"Although Rep. Gabbard's presidential campaign continues to gain momentum, she has seen her political and personal reputation smeared and her candidacy intentionally damaged by Clinton's malicious and demonstrably false remarks," Brian Dunne, a partner at the law firm, said in a statement.

Dunne added that Clinton had exhibited a "personal hostility" toward Gabbard last fall, and that the former secretary of state "resorted to a damaging whisper campaign founded on lies, and when presented with the opportunity to retract her damaging remarks, she refused."

According to the suit, Clinton felt slighted because Gabbard was one of the first Democrats to publicly endorse Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., for president in 2016 over her, "becoming the most prominent politician to do so at the time."

Clinton made her remarks during a podcast appearance on "Campaign HQ" with David Plouffe, a Democratic strategist. She did not identify the current Democratic candidate whom she was referring to, but also said Jill Stein was a "Russian asset" as the Green Party candidate in the 2016 election.

Former special counsel Robert Mueller's report and congressional investigations have shown that Russia's interference in the 2016 election included bolstering Stein's run.

Later, when asked if Clinton was referring to Gabbard, Merrill said, "If the nesting doll fits ... ." He subsequently tweeted that Clinton's comments were being misrepresented and that she was referring to the Republican Party, not the Russians, grooming Gabbard.

Gabbard seized on Clinton's remark, accusing her in a tweet of being the "queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long." The spat lasted for several days, with Gabbard saying on the campaign trail that it was bringing her negative attention, and that Clinton refused to retract her statements or apologize

 

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I'm somewhat ambivalent about Bloomberg as a candidate, but anyone who gets under Twitler's skin gets a thumbs up: "Bloomberg gets under Trump’s skin as he ramps up spending on 2020 ads"

Spoiler

Mike Bloomberg is lagging behind his Democratic competitors in the polls, and he will not appear on the next presidential debate stage or on the ballot in Iowa, New Hampshire or South Carolina.

But the former New York mayor has attracted the obsessive attention of President Trump, who is annoyed by Bloomberg’s constant ads targeting him, concerned about the billionaire’s outsize spending, focused on his growing numbers in the polls and seemingly fixated on his TV appearances.

The president has repeatedly attacked Bloomberg on Twitter, calling him “Mini Mike” to insult his small stature, and has frequently focused on him in conversations with campaign advisers and White House officials.

“It’s very clear that the ads we are running have gotten under his skin because they are effective,” said Howard Wolfson, a senior Bloomberg aide. “Mike’s poll numbers are improving, the president is screaming. Mike is a data-driven guy. When he sees data is working, he doubles down.”

Wolfson said to expect more blistering ads against the president in coming months. So far, Bloomberg’s spots have targeted Trump over impeachment, his position on vaping, his health-care-policy decisions and his relationship with the military. Many have prompted rapid responses from Trump, sometimes minutes after they air.

Bloomberg campaign manager Kevin Sheekey debuted a new ad on “Fox & Friends” on Thursday that cited a new book by two Washington Post reporters, who chronicle how Trump lashed out at U.S. military leaders, characterizing them as “dopes and babies.” Trump responded shortly after the spot aired.

“Mini Mike Bloomberg is playing poker with his foolhardy and unsuspecting Democrat rivals,” Trump tweeted. “The fact is, when Mini losses [sic], he will be spending very little of his money on these ‘clowns’ because he will consider himself to be the biggest clown of them all — and he will be right!”

Trump’s advisers have repeatedly encouraged the president to focus on other opponents instead. Campaign manager Brad Parscale and senior adviser Jared Kushner have warned against giving Bloomberg more attention and do not see him as the threat that Trump does, aides said. There is no plan for the campaign to target him with advertisements at this point, advisers said.

Trump has repeatedly brought up Bloomberg — calling him “evil,” in the words of one close adviser — and saying that he wants to destroy Trump with unrelenting money, even if the president does not believe Bloomberg can win himself, according to aides. He has called Bloomberg’s ads “lies” that are unfair depictions of his record in the White House. Several advisers say the president also references Bloomberg’s 2016 Democratic convention speech as a sore point and repeatedly asks advisers about his polling numbers, which have hovered below 10 percent in public surveys.

Other advisers have sought to elevate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), hoping that a leftist candidate could give Trump a good foil in the general election.

Parscale said this week that he would only worry about Bloomberg if he surpassed former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) in the Democratic race.

“It’s a free country, and he can set his money on fire if he wants to. He’s still in a statistical tie with the back of the pack in the Democrat field,” said Tim Murtaugh, a Trump campaign spokesman.

Trolling the president is different from convincing skeptical primary voters and defending his own record on issues such as stop-and-frisk policing in New York City. Bloomberg endorsed George W. Bush, for instance, and welcomed the Republican National Convention in New York in 2004.

But his path to the nomination could become clearer if former vice president Joe Biden stumbles in Iowa and New Hampshire, creating an opening for Bloomberg to use his significant advertising budget to argue that he is the most electable alternative.

In the meantime, the campaign has been using attacks on Trump as a rallying cry, both to recruit staff to his campaign and to convince Democratic primary voters that his campaign is more than the vanity project of another billionaire candidate.

Sheekey said the campaign will either be the “best primary campaign in American history” or the greatest independent spending campaign against an incumbent president that has ever been created.

As it stands, the Bloomberg advertising campaign is squarely focused on states that could help get Bloomberg the nomination, with only about 1 in 4 dollars going to the six swing states that his advisers expect to be competitive in the general election, according to Facebook ad spending data and a source familiar with the television buys, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because that person was not authorized to share the information publicly.

But that swing-state spending has still been considerable. Through Jan. 11, Bloomberg has spent $198 million on television advertising, including more than $47 million for spots in the projected swing states of Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. On Facebook, he has blasted another $3.6 million to voters in those states.

Before the year is over, he has promised to spend $100 million on a digital effort to defeat Trump in swing states, and he has committed millions more to an effort to register 500,000 new voters in those states. He is also building a data operation that he intends to use to elect a Democratic president whether or not he is the nominee, his advisers say.

In an interview, Wolfson said he wanted to draw a contrast with Democrats, who are attacking one another in New Hampshire and Iowa. Bloomberg has not competed in those states, knowing he would be unlikely to fare well, and is focused on Super Tuesday on March 3.

“We’ve chosen a different path. They are in Iowa and New Hampshire attacking one another. We’re making the case against Donald Trump,” Wolfson said. “Voters among all else are looking for a candidate that is best qualified to take on Donald Trump in a general election.”

Many of the ads Bloomberg has run include some mention of Trump, with many of the spots focusing on the president’s perceived weaknesses among swing voters.

“Health care is a huge vulnerability for him,” Wolfson said of Trump. “It’s the issue that won the Democrats won the midterms. It is difficult for him to defend his own record on health care.”

Bloomberg’s aides also plan on using the ground campaign that Bloomberg is building against Trump, whether or not he wins the nomination. Those hired in potential general election swing states — 60 in Arizona and more than 80 in North Carolina, for example — have been told they will have a job through the summer conventions or the November elections to organize against Trump.

Bloomberg seems to have approached the endeavor as a no-risk proposition, given that he had decided that defeating someone he calls an “existential threat to our country” was one of his top priorities.

“My Plan B is a hell of a lot better than anybody else’s Plan A,” he has told advisers, according to one aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Either Bloomberg wins the nomination and the presidency or he remains the 12th-richest person in the world with a chance of taking credit for defeating Trump.

 On the stump, Bloomberg takes delight in needling Trump, calling him a “real estate promoter” and not a businessman. He will recount the phone call from Trump after the 2016 election, when the president-elect offered his cellphone number. Bloomberg says he didn’t bother to write it down.

 Bloomberg also repeats an anecdote about Trump not knowing how to use a New York City subway card when they rode the train together many years ago. Trump has said this description is untrue, saying the gates were opened for them because they were traveling with a large entourage.

“I never had a MetroCard when I rode the subway with him, ” Trump told The Washington Post last year.

 

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Another Dem has left the race:

 

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This makes me so angry. I thought better of Rashida Tlaib. It goes to show you that many Bernie supporters are just as cult-like as the MAGAts. It's okay to have differences with the other candidates, but there should be a level of respect. Hillary isn't even freaking running for anything.

 

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This is an interesting article: "Amy Klobuchar was kicked out of the hospital 24 hours after giving birth. Her outrage fueled her political rise."

Spoiler

Amy Klobuchar was exhausted, exhilarated, shaken by a dizzying mindstorm of joy and pain. She’d been in labor for 18 hours, hadn’t slept in two nights, and now she’d given birth to Abigail and life was everything it could ever be. The baby “had all her fingers and toes and seemed quite healthy, except for some mucus in her throat,” Klobuchar recalled.

The new mother called her parents, filled out forms and finally dozed off.

Before long, someone woke her up: “Suddenly the nurse comes in and says ‘She can’t swallow. Everything comes out her nose,’” said Klobuchar, then a 35-year-old lawyer in Minneapolis, now a 59-year-old senator running for president. “And so from that moment on, it was like a disaster.”

The pediatrician on-call had news: “We think she needs emergency surgery.”

In her first day of life, Abigail was rushed into intensive care, subjected to a battery of scans and tests, and put under anesthesia so doctors could peer down her throat.

As that first day ended, though, a nurse plopped Klobuchar into a wheelchair and her husband, John, rolled her out of the building.

“Your time is up,” a nurse told her.

“And I go, ‘What?’” Klobuchar recalled. “And they said, ‘There’s just no way we can waive it.’”

In 1995, many American mothers faced that same arbitrary deadline: Insurance companies and hospitals, eager to trim costs, were sending women home after a maximum 24-hour stay, even when their babies required further treatment. Opponents of the practice called them “drive-through deliveries.”

Twenty-five years later, Klobuchar traces her political awakening to that moment, when the most fundamental fear any parent can face transformed her into a determined activist.

“I was obsessed with it, reading up on it,” she recalled. “I saw it as injustice for moms. I thought if men had babies, this would never happen. It was one of those one-size-fits-all policies that just didn’t allow for any humanity. You’ve been up for 48 hours, you’re a brand-new mom and you have no idea what you’re doing, and they kick you out. You don’t know if your child’s going to live.”

On that first day of Abigail’s life, Klobuchar’s friends and relatives called to find out when they could visit her in the hospital. You can’t, she had to tell them.

Klobuchar, who made her living representing big telecom companies, was told to sign forms saying she and John had watched the required videos on infant care, even though there’d been no time to see them.

“We lied and signed the forms,” Klobuchar said.

She rolled out of the maternity ward still wearing her hospital gown, heading to a $50-a-night hotel, where she would get precious little sleep. The hospital needed her to return every three hours to pump breast milk for struggling Abigail, who was being fed through a tube in her stomach.

Klobuchar stayed in the gown for three days, hurrying back and forth to the hospital all night long. Her baby would stay in the hospital for a week and then face a precarious and scary first year.

“Literally for the first six months, they thought she had cerebral palsy,” Klobuchar said. “They just didn’t know what was wrong. She had a nose tube for the first three months. That’s how we fed her, through a tube.”

‘Stand up and fight’

Five months after the birth of her only child, Klobuchar made the short drive to St. Paul, Minn., to the state capitol, where she made her first appearance before a legislative committee. The case she argued was her own.

Klobuchar urged lawmakers to “pass a law to protect mothers’ and babies’ rights. … What happened to me after I gave birth should never happen to anyone again. It was barbaric.”

Politics was nothing new to Klobuchar: Her father was a prominent newspaper columnist, she wrote her thesis at Yale on a thorny political issue in Minneapolis, and she’d already been a campaign manager for a county commissioner.

“The incident wasn’t my first rodeo in terms of being interested in politics, but it was in terms of having this gut-wrenching experience and then matching it with action,” she said.

Klobuchar didn’t appear to be a novice at political stagecraft. She brought six visibly pregnant friends to the hearing to be a visual prod for the lawmakers. The idea was to outnumber the insurance companies’ lobbyists.

It worked. It forged a bond with Minnesota voters that has endured to this day — a connection she has thus far struggled to make in Iowa and elsewhere on the presidential campaign trail. And it created an indelible moment that she would use a decade later in a TV ad that some say played a major role in her win in a Senate race.

“She has been smarter at exploiting that story than the reality of how instrumental she was in getting the bill passed,” said Dave Schultz, a political science professor at Hamline University in St. Paul who focuses on Minnesota politics.

But Klobuchar and some of the lawmakers she testified before say her first public venture into the political fray was anything but calculated.

It was a moment when Klobuchar discovered her passion for politics — an early sign she would be a politician who aims, as her campaign slogans have put it, to “get things done.” She would be a practical moderate rather than someone who challenges the system, someone who devotes her energy to pushing for one more day in the hospital, not for a completely new approach to health care.

“It greatly affected how I viewed the world,” Klobuchar said, “because I felt, wow, you know, really bad things can happen to regular people that make no sense at all. And someone’s got to stand up and fight it.”

‘Motherhood and apple pie’

The fight she knew best was the one she’d taken on at home. Her father, Jim, was a household name in Minnesota, a writer at the Minneapolis Star Tribune who chronicled the struggles and triumphs of ordinary people. But as famous as he was, Jim was both a hero and an embarrassment to his daughter.

He was arrested several times for drunken driving; each time, the story appeared in the newspaper where he was a showcased columnist. After one arrest, Amy found the word “drunk” plastered across the front of her school locker.

Amy suffered the stings when her father missed birthdays, vanished on Christmas, went AWOL from her college graduation. She pushed back: She took away her father’s car keys. She did everything she could to impress him, to win back his attention: ran for and won a seat on the student council in high school, became valedictorian.

“I once called the newspaper to try to get their help,” she recalled. “‘Oh, no, it’s fine,’ they said. ‘We just celebrated his sobriety.’ No, it’s not fine.”

In 1993, she staged a full-scale intervention, took her father to an addiction counselor and told Jim she loved him but he had to change.

She was always trying to alter her father’s behavior. “That’s a common trait of a kid of an alcoholic,” she said. “And I always think it’s so interesting: Someday, studies should be done of how many kids of alcoholics or people with drug addictions get involved in politics. You see this wrong and you want to fix it your whole life, and in my case, I was successful, actually.”

Her father stopped drinking, but his daughter kept trying to fix things.

She took an express lane to success: Yale, University of Chicago Law School, a big law firm. Former vice president Walter Mondale became a mentor. And she began climbing the ladder of local politics — party activist, convention delegate, campaign worker.

“It was clear she was going into elective politics,” said Mark Andrew, the former Hennepin County commissioner whose reelection campaign Klobuchar ran in 1990.

Klobuchar devotes the single longest chunk of her presidential campaign stump speech to the tale of her fight against drive-through deliveries. She gets a big laugh from Iowa audiences with a line she first used in her maiden speech before Minnesota legislators a quarter century ago:

“I learned a very valuable lesson. Back then, it was almost all men on the committees, and if you talk about really embarrassing things like episiotomies, they would, like, let you pass the New Deal.”

Audiences adore her story about bringing pregnant friends to pack the hearing room. And they applaud when she takes credit for the win. “So that was how we passed one of the first laws in the country guaranteeing new mothers and their babies a 48-hour hospital stay,” she says.

Victory has a thousand fathers, the old saying goes.

Don Betzold, the state senator who proposed the bill to end the 24-hour limit on mothers’ hospital stays, recalled the effort as the highlight of his career in the legislature. He said he drafted the bill after his wife, Leesa, was required to leave the hospital one day after their son, Ben, was born. Leesa later brought her infant to sit with her in the gallery to watch the debate on her husband’s bill — a move that one legislative leader told her was “unfair.”

Joe Opatz, the sponsor on the House side, also said the drive-through deliveries bill was “the most significant legislation I was involved in.” He too was motivated by personal trauma — the birth of his son and the hospital’s decision to send his wife packing. “We got home and Simon was struggling and we had to take him back to the ER,” Opatz said.

It was Opatz who got the call from Klobuchar, offering herself as a witness.

“Amy packed the conference room with these pregnant women and they made a pretty big impression,” Opatz said. “She’d had a much more traumatic experience with her daughter than I had with our son. The lobbyists for the hospitals and insurance companies tried to delay the bill and kill it, but the public response was amazing.”

Like Opatz, Betzold recalls Klobuchar as “a compelling witness — she was great.”

But by the time the drive-through deliveries issue blossomed in Minnesota, it had swept through much of the nation, and the insurance companies and hospitals fighting to keep the 24-hour limit had taken their defense underground, making their arguments largely behind closed doors for fear of public confrontations with angry mothers and pregnant women.

The insurance industry’s arguments were never going to be popular; an internal memo from the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan defended “the Eight-Hour Discharge” of new mothers by saying it helped mothers because “hospital food is not tasty” and it helped employees because the policy would “reduce our overhead costs.”

Klobuchar talks about Minnesota’s law requiring a minimum 48-hour stay as one of the first, but in 1995, the rebellion against drive-through deliveries “was one of the fastest-moving issues I ever saw,” said Kathryn Moore, who runs state government affairs for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which argued against the 24-hour limits.

The movement against those quick hospital exits was part of a nationwide backlash against managed care, the then-new system in which health-care companies put even stricter limits on patients’ access to care.

“New Jersey and Maryland were first,” Moore said. “Then it just took off.” Laws requiring a longer minimum stay passed in three states in 1995 and another 25 in 1996. “It was just a groundswell of pregnant women with their babies. We didn’t have to lobby on this — it was organic, spontaneous, the perfect storm. Motherhood and apple pie, David vs. Goliath.”

There was some pushback against change in Minnesota. A House member and family doctor, Richard Mulder, led the charge for keeping the 24-hour limit, saying he had delivered a thousand babies and had only rarely seen anyone who needed to stay more than a day in the hospital.

“I made sure my wife stayed in the hospital five days,” said Mulder, now 81, “but then she told me it was a waste of time and money. And I did some research and found that many mothers couldn’t afford the longer stay and in most cases, it just wasn’t necessary.”

Mulder, a Republican who says his defense of the 24-hour stay got him elected against an incumbent Democrat he portrayed as a big spender, scoffed at the show Klobuchar put on: “Heck, I could get a hundred mothers to come to a hearing to say that, but that’s not science.”

But Mulder was realistic enough to see that Klobuchar’s maneuver would likely succeed: “You always get more votes if you side with the little guy, in this case, the baby. Amy was easy to talk to, and she charmed them, but she didn’t know what she was talking about.”

Mulder’s lobbyist allies shied away from public battle, especially after, as Betzold recalled, an insurance company lobbyist testified that insurers shouldn’t have to pay for women “to take a vacation” after giving birth.

“His remark was not well received,” Betzold said.

“The lobbyists saw the handwriting on the wall,” Opatz said. “All they could do was try to delay implementation of the 48-hour requirement.”

Klobuchar spoke to legislators for 12 minutes. She was passionate, emotional, funny. “You could tell right away she had a knack for it,” Opatz said.

By a vote of 126 to 8, the Minnesota House passed the bill giving mothers and babies an extra day in the hospital.

The episode pushed Klobuchar into a new chapter of her career. As she puts it in her campaign stump speech this year, “the next thing that I did is just kind of start running for office.”

Actually, she had announced the year before Abigail was born that she was running for county attorney, the chief prosecutor position in the area around Minneapolis. But she had withdrawn immediately when the incumbent, an ally of hers, decided to seek another term. Now, she geared up to compete for the job in the 1998 election.

The push for the 48-hour law changed how she presented herself in politics: “Women’s and family issues rose up her list of priorities,” said Andrew, the county commissioner whose campaign she had run. “Before that, she was a do-gooder, very much a good government person, focused on transparency.”

But after the drive-through deliveries debate, Klobuchar’s focus shifted from opening up public records to kitchen table and family issues, especially those of importance to women. For Klobuchar, policy had hit home.

Her mother’s daughter

Klobuchar’s story was set. She won the prosecutor’s job with a get-tough appeal, under the slogan, “Safe Streets. Real Consequences.” But she talked to audiences “all the time about the experience with Abigail,” according to a person who was involved in the early campaigns and spoke on the condition of anonymity to maintain a relationship with Klobuchar. “It was how she humanized herself and demonstrated that she can get things done.”

Eight years later, running for Senate, her campaign ran a TV ad about the drive-through delivery fight. Over melancholic music and a heartbreaking image of newborn Abigail in an incubator, Klobuchar describes how her daughter was “hooked up to machines” while the hospital kicked the new mother out the door. The music swells and Abigail, a decade older, twirls around as she walks between her parents and her mother tells the story.

That joyful spin and Abigail’s double thumbs-up at the end of the ad were “just normal” for her, Klobuchar said. “They didn’t tell her to do that. And then we put that on our Christmas card. It became her signature thing.”

The ad was a hit, “one of the smartest political ads I’d ever seen in Minnesota,” said Schultz, the political scientist. “She was running maybe three points ahead, and she runs that ad and her lead jumps up to 13 or 14 points and she never has to look in the rearview mirror again. She got about 60 percent of the women’s vote. It was pinpoint accurate in hitting suburban women.”

But some Minnesota Republicans say that’s not how it happened, arguing that the election turned instead on the unpopularity of President George W. Bush and the Iraq War. “It’s a nice, after-the-fact narrative,” said a senior adviser to Mark Kennedy, Klobuchar’s opponent in that race, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Klobuchar hasn’t faced a serious challenge since that first Senate election. She has made her name in Washington on issues such as toy safety, swimming pool standards, anti-sex trafficking measures and clearing the backlog of rape kits in sexual assault cases — topics that sidestep the usual partisan divisions.

“She’s never really pushed on more controversial issues,” Schultz said.

Klobuchar sees herself as consistently pressing against “entrenched interests. And it started from that moment when I did the maternity bill,” she said. “Yes, it was about women and how women are treated in the health-care system. But I think at its core, it was about injustice.”

After the hospital stay debate, she said, she went from caring mainly about things like “What’s the best policy on recycling?” to “using the limited power that I have as one senator … to take on lead in toys” — issues people face at home every day.

“It’s always been a huge motivation for me when I think people have been basically screwed,” Klobuchar said.

Now, in the final days before the Iowa caucuses that could either propel her into the top rung of candidates or make it tough for her to continue in the race, Klobuchar is stuck in Washington, serving as a juror in President Trump’s impeachment trial.

She’s had to leave much of her campaigning to surrogates, friends and relatives who talk about her tenacity and spell out her ideas. One of those surrogates also reveals Klobuchar’s recipe for hotdish, a Minnesota casserole, her version of which contains ground beef, tater tots, cream of mushroom and cream of chicken soups, and a load of cheese.

The surrogate does not twirl, but nonetheless steals the show. She’s a 24-year-old aide to a New York city council member. Her name is Abigail Klobuchar Bessler.

 

 

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57 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Klobuchar’s recipe for hotdish, a Minnesota casserole, her version of which contains ground beef, tater tots, cream of mushroom and cream of chicken soups, and a load of cheese.

Is it bad to say here on Free Jinger that a Presidential candidate has her own recipe for Tater Tot Casserole? The Duggars would be so proud (and hate her politics)!

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3 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

 This makes me so angry. I thought better of Rashida Tlaib. It goes to show you that many Bernie supporters are just as cult-like as the MAGAts .  It's okay to have differences with the other candidates, but there should be a level of respect. Hillary isn't even freaking running for anything.

 

I have the full clip here .  

It was at the end , when it was mentioned what Hillary Clinton had said about Bernie Sanders .  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/21/hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders-nobody-likes-him-hulu-documentary  The way that it got reported though , it sounded as if it were a " two minutes hate"  .  

 

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I currently live in NJ and while I obviously still vote, it can definitely be frustrating in a way being in a "blue" state. We've obviously had republicans in office (ahem Chris Christie...) but for president, we go blue, which I'm proud of, but feel like I can't make a difference. I also never get to see Dems on the campaign trail!

I'm currently in the interview process for a position in Florida. I literally said to my husband last night, "if we move there, maybe I can make more of a difference!" I tried going to VoteSaveAmerica.com to look up even canvassing opportunities near me, and as of yet there are none. The only options are heading into the city to write letters to people in other places. 

How weird am I for wanting this job partially so I can try to register more people to vote in central FL :pb_lol:

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9 minutes ago, front hugs > duggs said:

I currently live in NJ and while Ijpg viously still vote, it can definitely be frustrating in a way being in a "blue" state. We've obviously had republicans in office (ahem Chris Christie...) but for president, we go blue, which I'm proud of, but feel like I can't make a difference. I also never get to see Dems on the campaign trail!

I'm currently in the interview process for a position in Florida. I literally said to my husband last night, "if we move there, maybe I can make more of a difference!" I tried going to VoteSaveAmerica.com to look up even canvassing opportunities near me, and as of yet there are none. The only options are heading into the city to write letters to people in other places. 

How weird am I for wanting this job partially so I can try to register more people to vote in central FL :pb_lol:

Funny enough , as an Ohioan , from a swing state , I have opposite issue .  If I ever deviate from voting for a major party candidate , as I did when I had voted for Jill Stein , I will get blamed for  " throwing my vote away " to a " spoiler " .  { http://anewdomain.net/why-you-should-stop-blaming-third-party-voters-for-trump/  ,  

https://www.inquirer.com/philly/columnists/michael_smerconish/jill-stein-gary-johnson-voters-third-party-2016-election-20180816.html  }  

 

I just feel that , while I will not let the perfect become the enemy of the good , I will always vote my conscience , no matter what others might think of me .  

john-quincy-adams-vote-quotes.jpg

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