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CNN et al. have been trying to make Kamala happen. Even Drudge seems to be in on the "consensus is gelling around Harris!" false consensus-building rhetoric. I have never seen any evidence that Harris has the intelligence or insight required to lead a nation. She was explicitly chosen for her current position by virtue of her sex and skin color, and sex and skin color have been the driving factors in her entire political career. To my mind this is frankly disqualifying, but of course--many Americans disagree with me there.
The fact that the second most likely pick currently appears to be a governor around whom the FBI decided to craft a kidnapping plot with which to libel right wingers does embarrassing things to my "deep state" priors.
Full headline:
That's what their defense attorneys say. Which is of course what they'd say. I'd recommend people read the full article to get a more comprehensive presentation.
And that defense was broadly successful, for several of the accused. Others took plea deals, and the convictions that stuck were, in the end, comparatively bland.
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Yes. And also at the beginning of her career: her sexual availability for Willie Brown. What a great patron to start her off.
Brown unironically was just about the best mentor she could have gotten. The dude bestrode the state like a colossus, and even at 90 is still pretty sharp. And I admit this against interest, not being in favor of his political agenda.
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Trump has been found liable for sexual misconduct in court so that has less resonance than you think.
Was she hotter when she was younger? Cause I can already see Trump making a joke about having a better taste in his proteges than Willie Brown.
Hu? She looks very well for a 59 years old, certainly she is more attractive than Trump ever was, and yes, almost every person was hotter when they were young.
https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/913ca94/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1988x1118+0+0/resize/1200x675!/format/webp/quality/75/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F62%2F2b%2F6e5e5d3ed119b7ebac744ed04df4%2Fla-1548054707-gcqxnc10qh-snap-image
Is the old man next to her her father?
No, that's Willie Brown, her then-boyfriend/political patron.
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But harder now for the Dems to attack Trump for this.
No, it's even easier - Kamala can say she's prosecuted sex criminals and frauds like Trump before, and no, the Willie Brown attack is not going to work outside of the Republican base.
However, if you want suburban women to vote 75-25 for Harris, then go ahead and do that attack.
It's my impression that women hate women who use sex to get ahead in the way that Kamala did.
Married women for sure. It’s a threat to their marriage having other women sleeping with their men. Kamala did come a decade after his divorce but there they still don’t want formerly married men doing well.
Nit: he was separated when they dated, not divorced.
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Both arguments sound plausible to me. This is why focus groups exist, I suppose.
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Sure, in their own personal life, maybe. Not being told that by right-wingers who want to ban abortion as they're calling Kamala a DEI candidate.
But hey, as a left-wing social democrat, I can only hope the Republican campaign becomes all about Willie Brown, how Kamala is a DEI candidate, and so on.
What’s the difference between a R or D President for a left wing social democrat?
A pro-union NLRB, support for expanded health care access, a plan to increase manufacturing that actually creates jobs as opposed to just increase tariffs, an IRS that goes after billionaire and millionaire tax cheats, stopping various Republican attempts to deregulate environmental, labor, and other sorts of law or cut social spending, putting Democratic judges on the bench, attempts at student loan forgiveness and reform, criminal justice reform, and since I'm a social progressive like the vast majority of social democrats outside of stupidpol, support for immigration, abortion, LGBT rights, feminism, and action against climate change.
Joe Biden has been the best President of my lifetime, and Kamala will likely be even be better because she won't be as wedded to being nice to Republican's or as abashedly pro-Zionist.
Regardless of what edgy rich left-wing podcasters in Brooklyn may claim, there are differences between the two parties, which is despite being to the left of 95% of the population, I am a partisan Democratic party supporter. Give me STV or proportional voting and I'll shift, but in a FPTP EC-based system, changing the Democratic Party form within is the only way for the goals I support to have a chance.
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Does Trump?
I don't think this switch will be good for the Dems (Biden staying would also not have been good for them, it's a no-win situation), but at least they can now make the instant switcheroo to "It's Trump who is old and demented, HE should drop out now".
Trump has absolutely lost a few steps from even '20, much less '16. He does not have the intelligence or insight that he had as a younger man. Still definitely has what's required to lead tho, imo
Trump did actually take a small loan of a million dollars from his slumlord father and build an international megacorporation with hundreds of the most prime real estate properties on planet earth.
Kamala, the daughter of a McGill professor and a Stanford professor, graduated from Howard University and Hastings College without distinction or any accomplishments of note before starting a relationship with the mayor of San Francisco and beginning to receiving a series of political appointments.
And still, he somehow managed to go bankrupt running a casino.
The casino went bankrupt. The real estate company that owned the building did just fine.
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But being endorsed by God (or whoever runs the simulation) counts for a lot.
Not as much as you think -- He plays dice.
Then forward anthropic shadow means this timeline has more weight because of something Trump will do.
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When the simulation runner is a degenerate gambler and just created a universe so he can embody into the meat npcs and throw dice.
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Likely no--though he does possess a certain raw cunning, which served him reasonably well in his first term. I think his handling of COVID was pretty bad, but prior to that I had no serious complaints. Whether he actually has the insight or intelligence required to lead a nation, he has actually done so, which seems to qualify as at least some kind of evidence. Harris, by comparison, appears to have had basically every political position handed to her. Whitmer, at least, has some executive bona fides.
Agreed--and really, I'd love it if Trump did drop out, too, though I have to wonder whether today's announcement was timed to make that maximally difficult for the Republicans to manage. I also wonder how thinking Democrats feel about having this happen now, after the opportunity to hold open primaries has passed. There's no way Kamala would have been the pick. It looks very much like the party is prepping a Clintonesque coronation, again--and there's nothing about Joe Biden's health today that wasn't known six months ago--or even four years ago. The tacit (and heavily papered-over) admission that Biden will not be fit to serve as President in January is also, I think, effectively an admission that he should probably have been removed from office for disability months, if not years, ago.
Au contraire; there were all sorts of things that weren't publicly known. Four years ago Biden was obviously on the downslope, but still capable of speaking in public for more than 15 minutes without garbling half his words or having his vocal timbre described as a "whisper." Just pull up the footage yourself: even at his bumbling worst 2020 Joe is worlds above 2024 Joe. Even six months ago he was still doing ok. Something really changed in the last 6-12 months; his "wandering" moments got a lot more frequent, and his speaking just dove off a cliff.
It's also quite likely that Republicans were implicitly or explicitly saying that Joe is demented long before he was actually exhibiting signs of it, which must have created a bit of a boy-cries-wolf effect for many Dems.
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I think a legitimate argument is stress over Hunter pushed him over the edge - there's interesting stuff that specific family stress can make otherwise fairly normal older people decline much quicker.
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Trump got the 2 big things right on Covid. Project Warpspeed. And the initial shutdown with a quick stimulus package.
The bad things on Covid were not fixable. Not being an island nation we were never going to Covid 0. And the other big issue is the media. The very worst lockdown actions came because the media scared the shit out of people for politics. I am not sure how Trump could have solved this issue. If the msm worked with Trump on covid policy then we would have had a better covid response. Things like keeping more of society open and running policy to protect grandma.
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They could go with "Biden still has enough juice to serve until 2025, but does not have enough juice that it would have last until 2029." Dunno how true it is, but they COULD go with that, and probably will.
Do they have to go there at all? The line is just that it's best if Biden doesn't stand again because it looks like he was going to lose, no reason to concede anything about his fitness to serve.
I think the issue there is doing it after the primaries.
"The candidate people voted for wasn't going to win, so we picked a different one for them" is kind of an awkward line to have to focus on.
I think it would be better if they had an open convention partly for this reason.
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Oh please let it be Kamala. She’s a purely lateral move in terms of actually winning as far as I can see.
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