Biden reacts to the Floyd killing and the violence

Amy Klobuchar has fallen from her high place on the list of possible Democratic VP nominees.

Biden spoke to a camera someplace today and said several black women were on the list.

If he dies, falls ill, or resigns in his first term we could have our first woman president, and a black woman, at that.

Assuming these riots don't win Trump's election for him.

They might very well do that.

Biden and the Democrats have to follow the MN governor and mayor, Bill Deblasio, Amy Klobuchar, and other Democratic politicians forced to deal with this and thread the needle, condemning the killing of Floyd, denouncing racism, denouncing police misconduct against black Americans, but at the same time giving no ground at all to violence and destruction.

Edge too far one way and white voters desert to the GOP that will in any case attack Democratic weakness and radicalism and smear the party with the "riot ideology" we heard of a few years ago.

Edge too far the other way and black turnout collapses.

Al Sharpton is in Staten Island preaching to peaceful demonstrators.

The cop who killed Floyd is in custody, but not his accomplices.

All in

Mayor Pete, Amy Klobuchar, and Beto O'Rourke endorse Joe B at a rally in Dallas.

Let's hope he doesn't fall over on the way to the White House.

Bernie is already sounding angry and bitter about "the Democratic establishment".

News stories were calling them moderates before this, but now they seem to be echoing Bernie's contemptuous and rather 1960s characterization.

The Stop Sanders movement has gone public

Chris could be right that the point now is to deny Bernie a first ballot victory in order to enable a brokered convention to pick Joe B.

Amy K withdraws, will endorse Joe B tonight at rally

With her 'Klomentum' gone, Amy Klobuchar ends her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who pitched herself as a moderate with Midwestern appeal and the political "grit" to beat President Donald Trump, ended her presidential bid Monday, her campaign said in a statement.

Klobuchar will endorse former Vice President Joe Biden at at rally tonight in Dallas, her campaign said. 

Will Mayor Pete show up at that rally?

Will Tom Steyer?

Bloomberg should drop out now, too, and throw his money and his ads behind Joe B.

But I don't think he will.

Nor will Warren withdraw and throw her support to Bernie.

Is that a brag, talking to Democrats?

Amy Klobuchar just now told Joe and Mika on MSNBC the names of several Republican office holders who have changed parties in order to caucus for her - at the Democratic caucuses - in Iowa.

She's bragging about this.

Does that really work?

Hurrah, hurrah; I'm the Democrat Republicans prefer for the Democratic nominee against Trump.

Screw them.

They don't get to force real Democrats to vote for the Republicans' favorite Democrat to stop Trump.

We get to force them to vote for the Democrats' favorite Democrat to stop Trump.

Joe still ahead, and he's not even in it yet

It may be that Biden has the best chance of winning, but he does not seem likely to be able to do anything with the victory.

He is too wedded to all that obsolete "across the aisle" and "bipartisan" bullshit.

He will not pack the court.

He may not even try to roll back the GOP tax cuts.

Still, any Democrat is better than any Republican, and at least his victory would get the Duce out of the White House.

Biden Still the Leader with 27%

In a field of 24 announced and potential contenders, Joe Biden currently has the support of 27% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters, which is similar to his 28% support in March and 29% in January, according to this morning’s Monmouth University Poll. 

Support for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is currently at 20%, which is down slightly from 25% in March, but still higher than his 16% support in January.

. . . .

South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg currently has 8% support. He registered less than 1% in prior Monmouth polls. 

California Sen. Kamala Harris has 8% support, off just slightly from 10% in March and 11% in January. 

Rounding out the field of top contenders are Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren at 6% (from 8% in both March and January) and former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke at 4% (6% in March and 7% in January).

Others who score at least 1% include New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker (2%, from 5% in March and 4% in January), former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper (2%, from 1% in priorpolls), Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar (1%, from 3% in March and 2% in January), and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (1%, from 1% in March).  

The remaining 14 names asked about in the survey receive support from less than 1% of Democratic voters at this time, which is basically unchanged from their support levels in prior national Monmouth polls.

. . . .

Race and gender do not seem to be important factors for Democratic voters when considering who the party should choose to run against Trump. 

Fully 87% say the race of the nominee does not matter. 

Just 5% say it would be better for Democrats to nominate a person of color, which is offset by 6% who say it would actually be better for the party to nominate a white candidate. 

Similarly, 77% say the gender of the nominee does not matter. 

Just 7% say it would be better for Democrats to nominate a woman, while slightly more (12%) say it would actually be better for the party to nominate a man.

Amy Klobuchar, a boss from hell

OK, I do hold that against her.

Over the years several of my bosses have been from hell, and usually they get away with it forever.

Just like bosses who are sexual harassers.

Such people are bullies and sadists, and those are not desirable traits in a president or indeed anyone else.

Except maybe a professional torturer.

She can try all she wants to tough it out and turn this into some kind of plus.

Sort of what Trump does with all his ugly character traits.

I'm not biting.

And I am really not buying the poor picked on powerful woman bullshit.

People do hold such behavior against powerful men, too.

It is just a lie that they don't.

Mitt Romney the high school bully, remember?

Amy Klobuchar Staffers Describe a Hostile, Dehumanizing Boss

Embracing the baloney

For a reality appetizer video, go here.

After which, read on.

'This primary is going to be a choice between socialism and a more just form of capitalism'

Chris Cillizza surrenders to the rhetorical strategy that emerged during the campaign of 2016, draining "socialism" of its actual meaning and using it as a label not only for the more progressive candidates for the Democratic nomination - actual and self-professed democratic socialists - but also for their more progressive agenda.

Some talking heads on MSNBC back then decided that owning the word and insisting it refer to any public ownership of any organization providing any good or service, at all, rather than public ownership of all the means of production, was the best way to deal not only with resurgent and false right wing denunciations of Democrats, their current agenda, and all the achievements of more than a century of progressive politics, as socialists and socialism but with Bernie's open profession of socialism.

They repeatedly cited public ownership of schools, hospitals, fire departments, police forces, bridges, and roads, calling each of these instances of socialism.

In this way they explained politics could be thought of as in part a matter of quarreling over what means of production ought to be in public hands rather than private, "all" and "none" being at the communist and libertarian opposite ends of a spectrum representing differing ratios or mixtures of the two - differing dosages of socialism and capitalism.

This move was dishonest then and is so now in that both Bernie and AOC have a well-known history with the DSA and routinely claim to be democratic socialists, meaning by that the real thing, and definitely not meaning the watered down Marxism and even post-Marxism of European Social Democracy, nowadays just a more advanced progressivism than our own, that both have urged America needs a greater dosage of.

And most actual socialists historically have referred to any economy featuring anything much less than public ownership of all the means of production as capitalist and sometimes to those in which some of the means were publicly owned as "mixed economies".

Democrats in general, whether or not they embrace all or part of the Bernie/AOC agenda and however appalled they might be at Republican projects of privatization of schools, roads, and prisons, overwhelming are not socialists and reject both socialism and "socialism".

The increasing acceptance of "socialism" among the young, including young Democrats, is doubtless due in some part, perhaps entirely, to the increasingly widespread use of "socialism" as those MSNBC talking heads used it.

And while those talking heads consistently endorsed the spreading tendency they had themselves helped to create to understand "socialism" in that way, they also agreed with Bernie's and AOC's assertions that America needs a significant dose of European Social Democracy.

Though apparently accepting their usage of "socialism", Chris Cillizza does not seem quite on board for Social Democracy or the Bernie/AOC agenda.

Actually, the environmentalist parts aside, the Bernie/AOC agenda itself is not much different from what TR ran on in 1912.

TR was not the Socialist Party candidate, nor was his the socialist agenda, of that year.

That distinction belonged to Bernie's professed political mentor and personal idol, Gene Debs, who advocated actual socialism, public ownership of all the means of production, or at the very least what was then called "the commanding heights" of the economy, including but not at all limited to the entire financial, transportation and steel industries.

But neither Bernie nor AOC is running on that agenda, nor have they said a word about it, though last time out Bernie did often give angry vent to his evident and sincere loathing of capitalism, in that way at least revealing his continued adherence to the real socialism of his mentor, usually at the same time denouncing the Democratic Party and the American political "system" with equal fervor.

TR flat out rejected socialism, and did so by its name, and was probably the most progressive of the other three candidates that year, and Taft the least.

In any case, since nobody is actually running on an agenda of flat out socialism, the primaries will not be a choice for Democrats between socialism and "a more just form of capitalism".

It will be, so far as the agendas go, a choice among different visions of the latter, with differing doses of concession to feasibility in a divided country and a divided congress.

But so far as candidates go, yes, it will be a choice between supporters, at least in their hearts, of out and out socialism on the one side and supporters of capitalism - "a more just form of capitalism" - on the other.

No, it's not President Donald Trump. 

(You probably figured that out from the "more just form of capitalism" part of it.)

It's actually from former Maryland Rep. John Delaney, who has been running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination since, approximately, 1991. 

And while Delaney is a long shot to be a long shot in this race, he's not the only one who is thinking about the two lanes of the Democratic primary fight that way.

"I will tell you I am not a democratic socialist," California Sen. Kamala Harris said during a campaign stop in New Hampshire on Monday. 

And in a CNN town hall on Monday night, another Democrat, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, was careful to make her skepticism of things like "Medicare for All" and the "Green New Deal" very clear.

What you see in all of that is a clear line being drawn between Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who announced his presidential bid formally on Tuesday, and the looming figure of New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez on one side, and the likes of Klobuchar and, assuming he runs, former Vice President Joe Biden on the other.

All the other candidates in the race fall somewhere along that spectrum -- roughly like this:

Sanders   Warren   Gabbard   Castro   Gillibrand   Booker   Harris   Klobuchar   Biden

Actually, with her wealth tax and her idea of putting workers on corporate boards, Warren's agenda is as aggressive as theirs and maybe in some ways more so.

And given she has shown as much as or more rhetorical heat denouncing "the system", it's possible she deserves the label "socialist" as much as Bernie does.

I don't know enough about the others from Booker leftward on the list to say.

What about Sherrod Brown?

From Booker leftward, the candidates are, broadly speaking, in favor of the "Green New Deal" and "Medicare for All." 

 . . . .

From Harris rightward, there is a healthy skepticism of the practicality (and political savvy) of backing those massive government programs.

Still, the Republicans and the conservative movement did invite this, what with their endless denunciations of all things progressive as socialism, Marxism, cultural Marxism, and even communism since the days of the New Deal.

The young and the ignorant for whom the actually existing Communism is ancient history were perfectly set up by the revival of that sort of rhetoric during the campaign of 2016.

Chris Hayes, Lawrence O'Donnell, and the others had an easy time of it selling their redefinition.

MSNBC just now talked about how thousands of Bernie supporters in key states Hillary lost went for Trump instead of her.

Not really a surprise, considering how both of them yelled about the rigged economic system, the evils of free trade, the rigged political system, and the stagnation of the working class.

And how much both of them claimed the two major parties were corrupt and in cahoots with a free trade loving plutocracy that cared only for itself.

Too, it was during his visits to Pennsylvania that Trump promised to strengthen both Medicare and Social Security, and denounced the Democrats for wanting to subvert them.

PS.

Of course, even the two most popular items on the original Bernie agenda, tuition free education at public colleges and universities and Medicare for All, are impossible without undoing pretty much all of the Republican tax cut, removing the cap on the Social Security tax (or is it the Medicare tax?), and boosting way up the marginal income tax rate for the higher and highest brackets.

And all of it is impossible without getting rid of the filibuster.

Politicians and the voters at large have to learn that elections have consequences, for real.

As for the wealth tax, all of the good it might do and less of the harm can be accomplished by putting the government back into breaking up too large corporate entities into smaller entities less willing or able to extravagantly reward their executives or their owners.

And just say no to worker-control.

Not sure she didn't let herself be bullied by Kavanaugh. He very rudely dissed her, badly.

Iowa Democrats weigh Sen. Amy Klobuchar's presidential ambitions

Maybe she was right to stay cool and not to go off in return.

But maybe not.

Was she being cool or being bullied and intimidated, right out in public, by his jackass performance, joined by nearly every single Republican?