Attorney in Texas
Attorney in Texas's JournalCan we stop the Biden-Warren nonsense and focus on our great REAL candidates? Warren said she isn't
running. Biden said he and his family may not have the emotional strength to run.
Leaving aside the scenario-crushing fact that neither candidate is running, Warren is not a fan of Biden:
“The group that will be most affected by the changes in the bankruptcy legislation Senator Biden so forcefully supports will be women, particularly women heads of household who are supporting children,” Warren wrote in the Harvard Women’s Law Journal.
“Not a single women’s group that has spoken publicly about the bankruptcy bill agrees with him, but his public position as a champion of women seems untarnished,” Warren added, according to the International Business Times.
...
Portraying Biden as a "zealous advocate on behalf of one of his biggest contributors," Warren in the 2002 article noted the connection between the credit card industry and Biden's home state of Delaware.
Responding to the renewed attention the article was receiving, a Biden aide told the IBT that “the vice president has been a champion for middle-class families and has fought against powerful interests.”... A year later, in 2003, Warren wrote in her book The Cement Life Raft that “[s]enators like Joe Biden should not be allowed to sell out women in the morning and be heralded as their friend in the evening.”
In 2005, Warren testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee and faced down a contentious line of questioning by Biden, who portrayed Warren's portrayal of the bankruptcy legislation as "mildly demagogic."
I'm a huge Warren supporter, and she has far too much integrity to join a Biden campaign (which would crush the campaign of Sanders who is much ideologically closer to Warren and damage Clinton's campaign, who is also closer to Warren than Warren is to Biden). Biden has a great personal story and he has been a good and loyal VP, but he holds no appeal ideologically to the progressive wing of the party, and he is too late to the game to take the centrist/establishment support that Clinton has already locked up.
So, this is not going to happen.
Yet even if a Biden-Warren ticket did happen, it would fizzle.
In order to have any remote chance of capturing Sanders support, the ticket would have to be Warren-Biden, not Biden-Warren. Everyone likes Biden personally; it's his career-long centrist, pro-bankster, pro-predatory-credit-cartel, hawkish, pro-harsh-penalties-for-drug-possession policies that progressives do not like.
Either Biden would have to change from a caterpillar to butterfly overnight, or Warren would have to sell out. SPOILER ALERT: neither of those two things is going to happen.
If anyone thinks that Clinton is being harshly attacked for a lack of authenticity, these attacks would pale in comparison to the charges of flip-floppery and opportunism if either Biden or Warren betrayed their entire careers to sign onto the same platform because Biden has historically opposed the best of what Warren represents and Warren stands opposed to much of the career's work from the "Senator from MBNA."
I'm a fan of Biden as a person, but he's to the right of Clinton, and Clinton is already too much of a centrist for my taste.
If I were picking a candidate based on who would be best to grab a beer with, Biden would make the short list, but I pick candidates based on their ideology, and a history of progressive advocacy, and their platform, and Biden does not make the short list (or even the medium length list) by this criteria. I suspect that Warren feels the same way.
Nate Silver at 538: "Hillary Clinton Is Stuck In A Poll-Deflating Feedback Loop"
Nate Silver, who is very robust about Clinton's prospects, has some serious analysis for her campaign to consider:
Feedback loops can produce self-reinforcing (but usually temporary) booms and busts of support. For instance, a candidate who has some initial spark of success, such as by doing well in a debate, can receive more favorable media coverage. That, in turn, can beget more success as voters jump on the bandwagon and his poll numbers go up further.
Candidates can just as easily get caught — or entrap themselves — in self-reinforcing cycles of negative media attention and declining poll numbers. Hillary Clinton looks like she’s stuck in one of these ruts right now.
The Washington Post’s David Weigel recently observed that voters were hearing about only three types of Clinton stories, all of which have negative implications for her. First are stories about the scandal surrounding the private email server she used as secretary of state. Next are stories about her declining poll numbers. And third are stories about how Vice President Joe Biden might enter the Democratic presidential race.
Weigel isn’t exaggerating: For roughly the past two months, voters have heard almost nothing about Clinton apart from these three types of stories. I went through the archives of the news aggregation website Memeorandum, which uses an algorithm to identify the top U.S. news stories of the day. I tracked whether there was a Clinton-related headline in one of the top three positions at 11 a.m. each morning and, if so, what the subject was.2 You can see the results below:
The whole analysis is insightful and well worth a full read beyond this excerpt.
PPP POLL: PLURALITY OF FLORIDIANS WANT JEB BUSH AND MARCO RUBIO TO DROP TO OUT
Source: FloridaPolitics.com (and Public Policy Polling)
A new survey in Florida shows 47 percent of voters want Jeb Bush to drop out of the GOP presidential race, and 48 percent would prefer Marco Rubio do the same.
...
“Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio are polling well behind Donald Trump and Ben Carson with Republicans even in their home state,” said Dean Debnam, President of Public Policy Polling. “And when you look at the overall Florida electorate, a plurality of voters think Bush and Rubio should just end their campaigns.”
Only 40 percent of voters in the state think Bush should keep running, compared to 47 percent who think he should drop out. Just 42 percent believe Rubio should continue on with his campaign to 48 percent who believe he should end it.
... Bush would lose to the New York City real estate mogul..., winning by a 55-38 percent margin. And Trump is actually has a slightly higher favorability rating in the Sunshine State in comparison to the former Florida Governor. Trump’s 56/35 favorability rating comes in a tick ahead of Bush’s 55/36 favorability. When we polled the state earlier this year Bush led the Republican field at 25 percent, and boasted a 66/24 rating.
Read more: http://floridapolitics.com/archives/190331-ppp-poll-plurality-of-floridians-want-jeb-bush-and-marco-rubio-to-drop-to-out
Here's a link to the polling.
This is HORRIBLE news for Bush's puppet-masters.
It's starting to look like well over $114,000,000 down the toilet.
Pretty damn bad news for VP candidate Rubio, too.
Donald Trump, protesters go big in Texas
Source: Politico
Meanwhile, both the number of protesters that have become common outside his campaign events and the intensity of their clashes with Trump supporters reached new heights.
Recognizing the roused spirit of the crowd inside the arena, Trump re-evaluated the label of “the new silent majority” he has bestowed on his supporters. “Maybe we should call it the noisy, the aggressive, the wanting-to-win majority,” he said. “That’s what it is.”
...
On Monday evening, the most pointed message at the rally came from Trump’s introductory speakers, tea party activists Katrina Pierson and Scottie Nell Hughes, and was aimed at the Republican Party. “I hope Donald Trump tears up that loyalty pledge,” said Pierson, who railed against the Republican establishment's attempts to undermine tea party candidates, including the Republican National Committee's insistence that White House contenders sign a pledge to support the eventual GOP nominee, whoever that might be.
Hughes said the Republican Party takes its conservative base for granted. “They think we’ll always be there. We need to end that this election cycle,” she said.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/09/donald-trump-2016-dallas-megarally-213625
The Question: How does this news relate to the yesterday's New York Times report that "43 Percent of Republicans Think Obama Is Muslim"?
The Answer: if you want to know where Trump's ceiling is, you have to conclude that it is not below 43%.
Ezra Klein: "Why Bernie Sanders's rise is more impressive than Donald Trump's"
Excerpts from some excellent analysis:
New polls show Sanders leading Hillary Clinton in both Iowa and New Hampshire. His leads aren't Trump-size — at least not yet — but they were secured without the wall-to-wall media coverage that attends Trump, without the name recognition Trump brought to the race, and against a much stronger frontrunner than Trump faced.
And Sanders has built those leads while remaining, well, Sanders. He promised he wouldn't run a negative campaign, and he hasn't — a fact that Clinton allies privately mention with relief. He hasn't signed on with a Super PAC or begun taking money from the kinds of donors he campaigns against. His campaign has been free of stunts and provocations and dense with policy proposals and issue papers. He's attracting supporters the old-fashioned way — by convincing people he's the kind of politician they want to back.
There is nothing inevitable about any of this. It was not obvious six months ago that Sanders would pull ahead of Clinton in Iowa and New Hampshire. Nor can his rise be explained away as simple "anyone but Hillary" sentiment: Sanders holds huge leads over Vice President Joe Biden, former Govs. Martin O'Malley and Lincoln Chafee, and ex-Sen. Jim Webb.
The full article is well worth a careful reading.
If you don't understand Trump's rise in the Republican polls, ask yourself three questions:
Trump's campaign is perfectly tailored to the driven-by-talk-radio-fabricated-fear voter. For over 2 decades, hate radio has created fact-free paranoia to drive no-information voters to the polls. These voters are not low-information voters, but are the people who go to the polls strongly believing utter nonsense:
* Saddam Hussein attacked the US on 9/11 and was hiding weapons of mass destruction,
* tax cuts for the wealthy trickle down to benefit the poor,
* Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya,
* the scientific community is sharply divided on the "theories" of evolution and climate change,
* the Estate Tax was killing off family farms, and
* voter fraud is a huge problem that must be addressed.
Ask yourself 3 questions:
Question 1: How stupid would you have to be to believe such nonsense?
Question 2: How stupid would you have to be to support Trump?
Question 3: If your answer to both questions is "pretty fucking stupid," do you think that's a coincidence?
Ron Fournier for The National Journal: "Rise of the 'Crazy Buts'” (an interesting article)
Here is an excerpt:
I spent most of the summer with Crazy Buts.
From Detroit, where my family lives, to northern Michigan, where my family vacations, I heard Republicans, independents, and even Democrats begin sentences this way: “Donald Trump is crazy, but…”
“Crazy, but he’s a winner, and I’m tired of America losing.”
“Crazy, but he can’t be worse than what we got.”
“Crazy, but he’s punishing the establishment.”
“Crazy, but he’s driving the media nuts.”
“Crazy, but he says what I can’t say.”
Most don’t mean “crazy” in a clinical sense. “Crazy as in crass,” a landscaper from rural Michigan told me in mid-July. “I’m not sure he has the temperament to be president, but I like how he’s messing with your minds in Washington. Crazy like a crash-test dummy.”
Christie far behind with Trump and Carson ahead in GOP race
Source: NJ.com
Trump, with 33 percent, and Carson, with 20, were the only GOP hopefuls to reach double figures in an ABC News/Washington Post survey of registered Republicans and GOP-leaning independents. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who began the year as the Republican front-runner, was in third place with just 8 percent.
Gov. Chris Christie received 1 percent, tied with former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who dropped out last week; Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum.
Read more: http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2015/09/trumpcarson_lead_gop_field_with_christie_fare_behi.html
Deadpool on Christie vs. Jindal vs. Santorum anyone?
Insider vs. Outsider Matchup Finds Clinton, Trump Near Even
Source: ABC News
The hypothetical contest stands at 46-43 percent, Clinton-Trump, a gap that's within the survey's margin of sampling error. That compares to a clear Clinton lead among all adults, 51-39 percent, indicating her broad support in groups that are less apt to be registered to vote, such as young adults and racial and ethnic minorities.
...
The close result in this poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates, says as much about partisanship as it does about the candidates. Registered voters divide 45-40 percent between identifying themselves as Democrats, or leaning that way, vs. Republicans or GOP leaners. And 82 percent of leaned Democrats say they’d support Clinton, while 76 percent of leaned Republicans say they'd back Trump, were they the party nominees.
...
Clinton's support among women is based on her overwhelming backing from college-educated women, 68-20 percent. By contrast, Trump leads Clinton by a broad 55-34 percent among men who aren't college graduates. He runs about evenly with Clinton among women without a college degree and among men who've graduated from college.
The education gap, like the gender gap, is outsized. In exit polls since 1980, there has been little difference in candidate support among those with a college degree vs. non-graduates, an average of just 2 points; the biggest gap was 11 points in 1996, when Bill Clinton's support was higher among non-grads (+14 points) than among college graduates (+3 points). In the Clinton-Trump matchup, there's a vast 35-point gap; it's 57-31 percent, Clinton-Trump, among those with a college degree, vs. 49-40 percent, Trump-Clinton, among those without one. Indeed, even among college-educated leaned Republicans, Trump’s support slips to 67 percent, vs. 80 percent among those without a degree.
Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/insider-outsider-matchup-finds-clinton-trump/story?id=33689594
Don't just look at the headline; the internal numbers are most interesting.
Clinton is crushing Trump among moderates (48%-36%), 18-29 year olds (63%-27%), college grads (57%-31%), in the Northeast where they know Trump best (63%-32%) as well as the West (55%-30%).
Chris Cillizza (Washington Post, The Fix): "Scott Walker’s remarkable Iowa collapse, in 1 chart"
"Are you a fan of Scott Walker? If so, you might want to avert your eyes from this chart":
Since February, Walker has gone from the front-runner in the state's first-in-the-nation caucuses to an also-ran. In a new Quinnipiac poll out of Iowa released Friday morning, Walker took a meager 3 percent of the vote -- which puts him in 10th place. TENTH!
Profile Information
Member since: Sun Aug 2, 2015, 11:10 AMNumber of posts: 3,373
