The first big Beto goes viral moment that I remember was him defending Kaepernick, so, yeah, I’m not surprised that he can drop some good stuff about race. Plus, with the shooting happening in his district, it probably put him in full DGAF mode. I don’t know that he has that mode when it comes to every issue, and I’m not even sure that DGAF Beto would be a good candidate, but it would definitely be more interesting.
I think this makes him much more ‘live’ for Senator in Texas, though it could also backfire on that. Texas is so complicated on stuff like this.
When most right wing Texans are uncomfortable about the ramifications of something, they just get quiet. When they’re comfortable, they’re loud. There has been nothing on my fb feed from any of them about either shooting. No sympathy, no gun toting, nothing.
The common thing has always been the ‘good guys with guns’ bullshit. But I think many are realizing this is about Trump radicalizing people, and their easy access to guns. They don’t want gun control, but they do see what it is, in my opinion.
Well the Beto we’ve been seeing for much of 2019 is certainly not a good candidate, so I’m certainly open to hearing more of this version.
I think he wanted to be seen as an above the fray type candidate, which is not what news outlets and anyone inside the Democratic base want. I think he’s mad about a lot of stuff and is very good on injustice. I think he’s too hopeful about a lot of others.
His tone has been perfect if he’s always been auditioning to run for Senator of Texas in 2020, and it’s maybe even okay for Veep. But for prez in this era, his message isn’t much different than kumbaya Biden and Booker, which is absolutely disqualifying to either as a primary vote for me.
Vice article on Biden’s MJ reform plan.
That should be that for him, then.
Here’s hoping. The politico piece about his brother and son and the hedge fund was pretty ugly as well. I’m sorry but if we want to really examine how Donald Trump got elected I feel like we have to start with the Democrats from the Boomer age group. They were arrogant, cynical, corrupt, and incompetent. They made all liberals look terrible. We should primary as many as we realistically can as soon as possible.
I’m telling you every iota of Donald Trumps second election equity comes from Joe Biden winning this primary and then being a huge fuck up. He’s like a slightly more charismatic, slightly less disciplined version of Hillary. I do not want to watch that matchup (or anything like it) ever again.
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It’s really important to remember that Joe was in Congress when the DEA started (was probably one of his first votes to establish it, though I can’t find the bill to see votes), and he could have been someone to stop it at the source.
All of these horrible things going on in Central America are directly related to the U.S.'s desire to stop the spread of Communism while financing and supporting the drug trade to meet that end. He’s got an insane amount of blood on his hands, and I don’t listen to anything he has to say about any policies related to the collateral damage from the start of the drug war.
Yeah… HRC losing was a huge ‘the emperor has no clothes’ moment for me. Yes the Russians were involved. Yes Trump told a lot of lies. Yes Comey fucked up. Yes lot’s of stuff happened. None of that matters. This shouldn’t have been loseable. Lots and lots of things went wrong for something as spectacularly unlikely as Donald J Trump being elected President of the United States.
I watched Gore lose to Bush Jr and I thought ‘Karl Rove is really good at politics’. I watched Kerry lose to Bush and I thought that incumbency was the single most powerful thing in politics. Then I watched Obama beat the two best GOP candidates of my lifetime back to back. Then I watched HRC lose to the worst.
These ‘mainstream moderate electable’ candidates are hot garbage. They lose races that would be trivially easy to anyone with actual talent and or integrity. They tried to take leadership and make it into a formula that you could follow exactly and be successful. That isn’t how it works. That’s never how it’s worked.
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I’ll admit something here about Bush vs. Gore. I couldn’t vote for Gore, and I hated Nader just as much. So I just didn’t vote. I hated Gore as much, if not more, than most hated Hillary. I hated that he ran away from Bill Clinton’s record. I hated him for who he and his wife were related to the music industry. I especially hated that he used a terrible strategy in the recount of Florida, and I hated him even more for giving up at the finish line allowing a presidential election to be decided 5-4.
That is the only time I haven’t voted in my voting life, and I am ashamed of it (even though my personal vote didn’t matter). I’m trying really really hard to help people avoid making that same mistake this time after so many made it last time. He still would have been better than Bush, and that election changed all of our lives significantly. Let’s never forget that NBC called Florida for Gore before the polls closed (they had closed everywhere but the panhandle), and they had a huge GOTV in the panhandle that put Bush over the top changing how elections are reported on forever.
That night in 2016 was the closest I ever felt to what I did when Gore gave up. That’s even as the election returns rolled in that night and you could see he was going to win the popular vote but lose the electoral college. All because of the SOS of Florida being a toady of Bush.
Yeah there’s a reason I’m a Warren supporter… and there’s a reason why my second choice is Yang. I seriously do not want a standard career politician to be the face of the Democratic party for the next 8 years. We need to change almost as bad as the GOP does.
Uh McCain and Romney being incredible candidates is a pretty hot take. The former, while pretty good, did pick Palin and obviously a Democrat was going to win after GWB almost certainly. Romney was the GOP’s Hillary, I mean who was excited to vote for him? 
Beto’s Spanish improved noticeably when I saw him speak the last couple of days. I attribute it to being less guarded, more sincere.
Remember that he’s being compared to W, Dole, and Trump. Sometimes you get to look good because everyone else was trash.
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heh. no surprise about the Gravel thing.
Hot off the presses:
When America was attacked on 9/11, we immediately said that we would never allow it to happen again. We declared that those attacks would change us for the better and we mobilized to action. - PB
My initial thoughts are - the attacks changed us for the worse and our actions were horrible and did not make us more safe.
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WTF, how does anyone who lived through the Patriot Act and Abu Ghraib say something like that.
Regarding the rest of the plan…some of it sounds good, but…
There was a discussion I saw the other day with Chris Hayes and two other guys. One guy was all about how we need to give police more resources to combat domestic terrorism like international terrorism is fought. The other guy was a Muslim (pretty sure) who was like “hold up a second”.
I mean they did change us for the better…for about 6 months.
but yes, one sentence invalidates the entire plan, i suppose.