The bullsh*t narrative that progressives failed

The media is pushing the narrative that the progressive, Berniecrat wing failed, so the Dems should tack right again.
I have several ways to prove this wrong.
I'd like to start with Lucy McBath.

Georgia Democrat challenger Lucy McBath has defeated Republican Rep. Karen Handel to be elected to Congress, CNN projects.
Handel conceded the race for Georgia's 6th Congressional District early Thursday morning in a statement posted to Facebook.

Who is McBath?
McBath is a former flight attendant turned gun control activist, and who wants to expand Medicaid and Medicare. In other words, too progressive for Georgia.
So, why does she matter?
Because Georgia's 6th Congressional District is the very district that centrist establishment candidate Jon Ossoff lost in just last year.

A lot of progressives lost in this election, like Beto O'Rourke. So does that mean that voters don't want progressive candidates.
My response to this is Paul Sadler.
Who is Paul Sadler?
Sadler lost to Cruz by 15 points in 2012, while O'Rourke lost by less than 3 points.
While O'Rourke was somewhat progressive, Sadler opposed gay marriage, supported the death penalty, 3-strikes laws and the War on Drugs.
Interestingly, establishment candidate Sadler barely beat a completely unknown retired school teacher in the primaries named Grady Yarbrough.

Having eyed the Senate seat for several years, Yarbrough paid a $5,000 filing fee to join this year’s fray. Eschewing contributions, he said he’s spent about $20,000 in retirement savings on billboards, mail and travel — mainly to target minority voters.
...
“I am doing selective campaigning. When there is a heavy Hispanic and African American population in those counties, I go directly to those places. That’s how I’ve gotten to where I am now,” he said, adding that he’s campaigned in Kingsville, Laredo and Brownsville.

Do you think that Yarbrough might have stood a better chance? I do.

The close (and possibly rigged) losses by southern progressives does not prove what they say it proves.

Yet Gillum won the highest percentage of the vote of any Democratic candidate for governor of Florida since 1994, and Abrams outstripped any Democratic candidate for governor of Georgia since 1998.

Meanwhile, in Texas, Beto O’Rourke’s emphatically progressive Senate campaign won the highest percentage for any Democratic gubernatorial or Senate candidate since 1990.

Many of the biggest losses of the night were center-right Democrats. Senator Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota were just some of those so-called "moderate" losers.
It's hard to claim victory by the center-right wing, when most of the center-right Senators are gone.

Then there are the issues.
One clear takeaway from the election is that voters prefer progressive stands on the issues.

For years, the people of Idaho, Utah and Nebraska watched their legislatures stubbornly refuse to widen Medicaid coverage as Obamacare proposed — forfeiting, in the process, billions in federal aid. On Tuesday, they took matters into their own hands, passing ballot initiatives to end the nonsense. In three more states — Maine, Kansas and Wisconsin — voters elected Democratic governors who promised to push for the same.

Voters in red states clearly want more government provided health care.
This happened in an election in which Trump and the GOP was yelling "Scary Socialism!"

what it means for health care as a political issue. A big night for Medicaid means a big night for Medicare-for-all.

Medicaid expansion was big, but not the only progressive winner.

Voters raised the minimum wage in Arkansas and Missouri...In Florida, they restored voting rights to over 1.2 million convicted felons ― a civil rights victory that will transform the state’s electorate of 16 million. Utah ― Utah! ― legalized medical marijuana.

Most of these initiatives weren’t close.

Now compare that to the Democratic candidates in those same states.

Missouri: Center-right Claire McCaskill lost her Senate re-election bid by more than 140,000, while the voters raised the minimum wage to $12 and said "yes" to medical marijuana.

Florida: Center-right Bill Nelson lost his Senate election bid, while the voters banned offshore drilling and restored voting rights to over 1.2 million convicted felons.

The problem isn't progressive ideas.
The problem is that Democratic candidates usually suck, and the reason they usually suck is because the Democratic Party establishment almost never supports progressive candidates.

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The Aspie Corner's picture

From Tampa Bay Times:

Two days after Florida's election, a U.S. Senate seat remains in limbo, the governor's race moved to within recount range and the Democratic candidate for agriculture commissioner assumed a narrow lead.

Welcome to recount-ageddon.

Even for Florida, home to the most notorious recount in modern history, this election is heading toward an unprecedented conclusion. Three statewide races and three statehouse races appear headed to a recount.

From here on out, Florida is in uncharted territory.

In two South Florida counties, results continued to trickle in the Democrats' favor as workers made their way through thousands of uncounted ballots. Gov. Rick Scott announced in a Thursday evening press conference that he, as a candidate, is suing Broward and Palm Beach counties for what he said is a lack of transparency.

By mid-Thursday, for the first time since Tuesday night, Democrat Andrew Gillum inched close enough to Republican Ron DeSantis to force an automatic recount in the governor's race. As of Thursday evening, just 36,219 votes separated the two in a race with 8.2 million ballots cast.

Meanwhile, Republican Rick Scott saw his lead in the Senate race over Democrat Bill Nelson shrink to 22,000 votes Thursday morning. By the end of the day, Nelson trailed by just 15,079 votes and his team saw a path to victory.

"At the end of this process Sen. Nelson is going to prevail," said Marc Elias, a veteran Washington, D.C., recount attorney hired by Nelson. "I am very measured in how I treat what I say. When I say it is currently a jump ball … I mean that."

Not that it matters, though. The Repig Terrorists will still have a stranglehold on 'Murica's Wang and Debbie Wasserman Shill will do all she can to keep it that way.

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Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.

Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.

boriscleto's picture

@The Aspie Corner

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" In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry, and is generally considered to have been a bad move. -- Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy "

@boriscleto link

What I think is clear at this point, however, is that Republicans have been massively irresponsible in throwing around wild accusations without any evidence at all. Naturally, this goes from the president on down, with Donald Trump tweeting “Law Enforcement is looking into another big corruption scandal having to do with Election Fraud in #Broward and Palm Beach. Florida voted for Rick Scott!” Trump, of course, has no idea how Florida voted because the votes haven’t been fully tallied. Nor is he providing any evidence at all of “corruption” or “fraud.”

The president isn’t alone. Marco Rubio tweeted out similar accusations. Other high-profile Republicans did as well. Perhaps the weirdest was Rudy Giuliani, who claimed without evidence Democratic counties in Florida were “creating” ballots and put forth the novel legal theory that any votes still uncounted in some counties after other counties have completed their counts should be disqualified.
...
Trump is so committed to undermining democracy — or has so little faith in it — that he became perhaps the only politician in history to falsely, and without evidence, claim voter fraud after an election that he won. Republicans have been making claims about one type of voter fraud — in-person impersonation — that has been shown conclusively not to exist in any numbers worth talking about. Combine those, and we apparently have a party that makes the most serious claims at the drop of a hat every time an election gets close. Evidence? Irrelevant. That’s just the playbook.

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replacing the fascist Democrats or replacing the fascist Democratic Party. It appears that the former is clearly the desired path. Will it succeed? Will it succeed in time? Not if Nancy Pelosi has anything to say about it.

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On to Biden since 1973

Wink's picture

She can barely string
@doh1304
two sentences together. And even if she wins her gavel back on a sympathy vote, she will be asked to leave the post before her 2 years are up, lest she further embarrass the party.

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the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.

@Wink as long as she keeps being the #1 fund raiser for the Democrats. As long as she keeps the money flowing everyone getting their slice of the pie will be perfectly fine with her.

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gulfgal98's picture

@MichaelSF Your comment is spot on. For the Dems, it is all about who is the best fundraiser and no one can top Pelosi.

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

Wink's picture

the "party" actually
@MichaelSF
gives a fuck about winning.

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the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.

well.

If they had made healthcare the number one issue, IMO, they would have had a huge blue wave. (not that they mean to actually do anything about healthcare.)

Even the fox people made a similar assertion and noted that the dems win on healthcare (and this was even before the Kavanaugh stuff).

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dfarrah

Wink's picture

two of our local
@dfarrah
congress critter candidates (including my own) to run on Med 4 All.
"Can't do it, this is a Conservative district, Wink... "
yeah, well, guess what? Conservatives want Med 4 All too. 52% of Repubs favor Med 4 All.
They wouldn't pull that trigger, went with "access for all" instead. And lost.
Dims need to run on Med 4 All in 2020. It is THE winning issue.

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the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.

Azazello's picture

@Wink

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We wanted decent healthcare, a living wage and free college.
The Democrats gave us Biden and war instead.

smiley7's picture

@Wink
support preexisting conditions.

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Wink's picture

@smiley7

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the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.

The Liberal Moonbat's picture

Anyone else starting to develop a nasty allergy to that word?

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In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!

@The Liberal Moonbat I think of it loosely as "story" or "story-line"...
Maybe this is a word that is overused in your field that has not become overly common speech in mine? Eh, I don't know. It's pretty clear and ok with me though.

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The Liberal Moonbat's picture

@peachcreek Corporate media have decided that there are no such things as "facts", only "narrative". It's like college literature departments made a desperate bid to amplify their self-image decades ago, and it's all gotten horribly out of hand - I had an article specifically about this, but I can't find the damn thing now, so here's Noam Chomsky (AKA 'The Lich-King of the Left-Wing') with something not unrelated:

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In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!

@The Liberal Moonbat

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The Liberal Moonbat's picture

@peachcreek
I actually addressed it my third essay personally contributed to this site.

I'm just so glad we've still got Noam.

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In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!

Vox

But the emerging conventional wisdom among Beltway centrists is the opposite: that Democrats overreached, tacking too far to the left and ending up with a mediocre-at-best result.

“Don’t listen to Democrats who portray these midterms as an important triumph. In 2016 and again this year, liberals listened too much to one another and not enough to the country as a whole,” writes the New York Times’s Nick Kristof, a center-left columnist.

“The result of the midterms means, if nothing else, that the president survived his first major political test more than adequately,” Bret Stephens, Kristof’s fellow columnist on the center-right, wrote the day after Kristof. “Unless Democrats change, he should be seen as the odds-on favorite to win in 2020.”

These two columns, and several similar ones published in recent days, follow basically the same script. They argue that the most progressive parts of the Democratic Party are to blame for the party’s allegedly weak performance in the midterms.
...
Pundits made the point that had Democrats not skewed so far left, incumbents in red states like Indiana, Missouri, and North Dakota could have hung on. Yet Beto O’Rourke came closer than any Democrat to winning a Texas seat in decades, while Ohio labor populist Sherrod Brown handily won a state that grows redder by the cycle.
Democrats flipped — as of Friday morning — nearly 40 seats in the house. It is, as Cook Political Report analyst Dave Wasserman notes, the largest Democratic House wave since Watergate.

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@gjohnsit

The result is an electorate polarized into two camps, with very little room for compromise; a nigh-intractable electoral split that I’ve termed a cold civil war.

The link is to an article that says this:

This is a longstanding divide in America, one that accelerated under President Barack Obama. But President Donald Trumps’s 2016 campaign, the most racially divisive in modern history, escalated this into a kind of cold civil war. Trump’s victory was a kind of political Fort Sumter, a sign that a smaller and more racially conservative part of the country would not accept social change without a fight.

To which I say: Balderdash. I've been calling our political situation a Cold Civil War for over a decade. Civil wars, cold or otherwise, are fought primarily, not with divisive election rhetoric (though propaganda plays its part, as in all wars), but with the actual exercise of power. The political Fort Sumter in this case was the Republicans' all-out attack on Bill Clinton, in which they pulled out every stop to:
A. Prevent him from governing effectively
and
B. Somehow get something on him that would justify impeachment and removal from office.

In the aftermath of that we saw an unending parade of seditious behavior that, in almost any nation anywhere prior to about 1870, would have brought the perpetrators to the block, the gallows or the guillotine:
A. The Brooks Bros. riot
B. The Florida and Federal Supreme Courts both thwarting the counts in Florida in defiance of their own ideological biases.
C. The onslaught, beginning under Bush but accelerating after Obama's election, of voter suppression techniques, carried out with shameless disregard for morality or ethics.
D. The Supreme Court's preposterous finding that certain Civil Rights era protections of the franchise were no longer warranted.
E. The bizarre, explicit, seditious (and, incidentally, oath-violating) refusal of the Republicans in the Senate, even when in the minority, to allow the duly elected President to exercise his executive authority.
F. The spectacular gerrymandering of 2010-11

And so on. There is your Cold Civil War, a phrase I've been using for over 10 years. (Might be interesting to go back to dPOS and see when I first employed it there, though I think I thought it up before I ever logged in to that site. And I'd have to care a lot more about the answer before I'd actually go back there to find out.) The CCW isn't the part where you rhetorically whip your supporters into a frenzy -- the CCW is the part where you exercise whatever power you can, however you can, without regard to law or morality or ethics (as in regular old hot war), to attack the power of the enemy.

And the fundamental problem we've had all along is that only one side is fighting the war -- and it's the side that considers people like us to be the enemy.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

@UntimelyRippd the Republicans for.

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I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.

@The Voice In the Wilderness
along, surrendering over and over to Republican seditious malfeasance and misfeasance.

Thus, the now common comparison with the Washington Generals.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

WindDancer13's picture

I had been living in an alternate universe given the many recitals of progressives losing I have seen (including at c99). Thanks!

To add to the awakening:

I am still feeling no sorrow over the losses of Donnely, Heitcamp and McCaskill so I must be in the right universe now.

Bernie Sanders does not beleive progressives lost:
These 14 Democrats Are at Core of What Bernie Sanders Calls the 'Most Progressive Freshman Class' in Modern US History

As conservative pundits and self-interested corporate Democrats predictably attempted to spin this week's midterm election results as a win for so-called moderates and proof that the Democratic Party should tack to the center, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) dismissed this "absurd line" in an interview on Thursday and called the incoming crop of newly elected House members "the most progressive freshman class in the modern history of the United States."

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We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.--Aristotle
If there is no struggle there is no progress.--Frederick Douglass

in the primaries.

I'll never forgive them for that. Without that Southern Wall she could never have cheated enough to beat Bernie.

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I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.

@The Voice In the Wilderness

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

@UntimelyRippd
Why do African-Americans on the tube and the intertubes seem to be so abysmally stupid and ignorant?
All the African-Americans that I have worked with have been smart. Not necessary educated, but alert and intelligent. And my last job was working in a postal processing plant with around 800 people about half of which were black. To be frank, some admitted that they didn't trust Bernie because he was a Jew, but they had no use for Rahm (perhaps partly for the same reason) and saw through the Tea Party although most of the whites didn't.

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I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.

Deja's picture

@The Voice In the Wilderness
Perhaps many were finally "brought to heel"? At least the "super-predators"?

Gawd, everything about that woman makes me sick.

I'm thinking the vast majority (just like white people) don't know she said that, on mic, and on camera.

Just like most Latinos (and most non Latinos) have never heard of Berta Caceres, or how/why/when she was assassinated; and so they voted for Her. [Her dismissal 'rally' in L.A. had some pretty loud protestors outside, though; and they knew who Berta was.]

It's still the same thing now. The dims are angels and the repubs are devils. That's what they're told, and anything that would prove otherwise, or at least cast doubt, is kept from them. I'm betting you'll find a fraction of info on Berta in a Google search, but that's not the case on duckduckgo. We've all been brainwashed to "google it" after all. Ack!

The ones who love that nasty woman, and her party are brainwashed, and don't know how or don't care to verify info they're fed. Same with team R zombies. I think the rest of us are a dying breed.

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@Deja
And you are right! A LOT more information.
I'll remember that. Thanks for the tip.

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I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.

@The Voice In the Wilderness

they had no use for Rahm (perhaps partly for the same reason) and saw through the Tea Party although most of the whites didn't.

the AA community is so much more savvy than whites. It's ridiculous.

Although I don't get why they don't like Jews.

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@The Voice In the Wilderness
but the answer is pretty simple: Conservative Southern African American Evangelicals have a very different agenda from that of most other African Americans. They also dominate the African American political scene in the south. This gives reactionaries like HRC the opportunity to sweep through the southern primaries "establishing" their popularity in "the" African American community.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

travelerxxx's picture

@UntimelyRippd

Conservative Southern African American Evangelicals have a very different agenda from that of most other African Americans. They also dominate the African American political scene in the south.

During the 2015 campaign to defeat the city of Houston's HERO Ordinance, opposition to the ordinance by Houston African American churches may have been what brought about its defeat. This was an anti-discrimination ordinance known as the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance. The Black churches stood side-by-side with the most foul of right-wing extremists to support discrimination in housing and occupations. I wouldn't have believed such a thing could happen had I not seen it.

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@travelerxxx
expect southern african american evangelicals to have values systems similar to those of any other american evangelicals. They're hostile to women's reproductive freedom, and they're hostile to equality regardless of sexual orientation or identity, for the exact same reasons that northern white evangelicals are hostile to those things.

If being on bigotry's business end were any inoculation against catching the disease oneself, Israel would be a very different society from what it is. For that matter, the Scottish highlanders who settled the Canadian prairie would have treated the Indians and the Metis very differently.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

@UntimelyRippd
That would explain it. Almost all African-Americans I know were born and raised in Chicago, although I do know some migrants from the South. Like the owners of the auto body shop I go to. He is from Texas and works and supervises in the shop, while she (from Mississippi) runs the front office and deals in used cars on the side.
Another example of immigrant entrepreneurship. Those who leave their home and culture to move to an alien place have more drive almost by definition. The complacent tend to stay home.

Yet the Civil Rights rebellion began in the South. Perhaps because that was where the sharp end was. Not that Chicago, New York and los Angeles didn't have problems also.
And I was always surprised that Brown vs Board of Education was about segregation in Kansas.

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I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.

@The Voice In the Wilderness
the black churches of the south, which were the centers of middle class social and political life. They wanted equality between the races, but mostly they weren't pursuing a leftist social/economic agenda of socialism, feminism, or sexual rights.

That's why it was a big deal when MLK started working against the Vietnam War, and for labor rights. It marked a BIG shift in the movement's scope.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

I'm guessing no relation to Barry Sadler

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I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.

@The Voice In the Wilderness
families fight families.

anyone know what happened in that race where the Republican clown's siblings did an ad saying he sucked for realz?

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

edg's picture

Democrat challenger

My god, are there no editors? The usage requires an adjective -- Democratic. Sheesh.

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Deja's picture

@edg
I like your new pic! You're smiling, and look as though you lost a lot of weight. The old one looked a little like, well, a mugshot. Hopefully that wasn't rude to type out loud. (Been told more than once that I lack decorum. So there's that.)

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edg's picture

@Deja

I did lose weight. The old photo was run thru the watercolor filter on Photoshop to intentionally blur and distort it but I decided not to bother this time.

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have done if their national mouthpieces had stated clearly and unequivocally that the party's legislative agenda was to provide, at both state and federal levels, the relief the people demanded for themselves in those ballot initiatives and referenda:
A. Legal marijuana
B. Medicare for all
C. Fair elections, predicated first on protection of the right to vote

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

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Hillary Clinton, The only thing that would get rid of Pelosi is if she keeled over and died (obligatory not threatening her life disclaimer)

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BernieOrBust's picture

My burning red father who voted for trump and still digs him was recently diagnosed with cancer. He has a cheap, shit, Medicare advantage plan, and can’t get the level of care he needs with it. He is steaming mad and rants on a regular basis about needing SINGLE PAYER healthcare in the U.S.!!!! I about fell out of my chair the first time he said that.

People need/want comprehensive Medicare For All type healthcare! Dems are increasingly realizing this, but they should embrace it full throttle, and push for it like crazy.

The old guard need to retire positions of leadership, and let the new, young, energetic crowd start getting stuff done minus all the corporate influence.

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dervish's picture

@BernieOrBust from getting things done is rather the point. The leadership won't give up power until you pry that gavel from their cold, dead fingers.

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"Obama promised transparency, but Assange is the one who brought it."