At the end of the day it comes down to this. Who do you trust to break down ALL the barriers to progress that prevent Americans and America from reaching its’ greatest potential ? Not just economic barriers but international, social, racial, legal, health, educational, and gender.
I trust Hillary. Why ?
First and foremost, as an early architect of the successful Iranian nuclear disarmament agreement and the START Treaty with Russia to reduce their nuclear arsenal , I trust Hillary Clinton as Commander-in-Chief to keep us safe from all enemies — both foreign and domestic. As Secretary of State, she was the President’s most trusted advisor urging him to hunt down bin Laden and bring him to justice. More recently, she was an early backer of the global warming change initiative in Paris.
At home, I trust Hillary to ensure domestic tranquility by championing economic and social justice. Advancing income equality for the working middle class by raising taxes on the top 1% and creating jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure : roads, bridges, schools, water and sewer systems, airports, seaports, commuter rail and rapid transit. And transitioning to clean, renewable energy especially wind and solar. These are all good paying American jobs that can’t be outsourced.
I trust Hillary to build on the Affordable Care Act to achieve universal healthcare — moving us from 90% coverage to 100% — by lowering prescription drug costs, out-of-pocket expenses, deductibles and co-pays.
I trust Hillary to reign in the obscene abuses of Wall Street over Main Street — not just where “no bank is too to big to fail, no executive is too big to jail” — but in the dark alleys of ‘shadow banking’ where insurance giant AIG and mortgage giant Countrywide exert perverse influence over our financial system. These are the same greedy corporate criminals that orchestrated the crash in ’08 causing irreparable harm to millions of our fellow citizens who lost their jobs, homes and investments.
I trust Hillary to nominate Supreme Court Justices who will overturn the abominable Citizens United decision that corrupts our democracy with anonymous dirty money.
Finally, I trust Hillary because she is strong on immigration reform, reducing college debt, sensible gun control, protecting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, pay equity, raising the minimum wage, early childhood education, expanding voting rights, criminal justice reform, and so much more.
If the past is prologue, Hillary’s lifetime of public service is the best guarantor to a future of peace, prosperity and progress for ourselves and our posterity.
I urge a vote for President Hillary Clinton in the Super Tuesday Democratic Primary on March 1. Just like your flu shot — it’ll hurt a little bit but you’ll be glad you did it !
Fred Rich LaRiccia
Hillary Clinton in Black history
The lie of “Humanitarian Intervention”
From a purely pragmatic standpoint, running Clinton against Trump is a disastrous, suicidal proposition.
That guy is afraid of Travelgate and Whitewater? The GOP has been running that campaign against the Clintons for 24 years straight, and have zero wins so far.
It also seems to me that the voting population in November is not exactly comparable to 30% of the voters who vote in Republican primaries.
And it ignores that Trump, if the nominee, isn’t necessarily going to use the same tactics– he said right from the get-go that the candidate cuts directly to the center upon achieving the nomination.
I think I am okay if a TRumo campaign in the general is a continuation of the GOP primary– have you seen the guy’s favorable/unfavorable numbers, nationally?
It is true enough that there is going to have to be a strategy to deal with the bullying style: “Q: Well, how do you intend to get Mexico to pay for a wall? A: Because I said so, and now I will build it 10 feet higher. [everybody cheers]” This will be a particular problem for the debates.
But I don’t see how Sanders is any better positioned to deal with that. There will be other shit to throw at Sanders, except that it won’t be boring crap that everyone has heard before. It will be interesting new crap.
Yes, they average out to about -20. HRC’s are -13.
I think the Current Affairs piece way overstates Sanders’s ability to do much better, but I think a lot of the analysis is spot on. Clinton’s weaknesses play to Trump’s strengths in a way that Sanders’s do not.
Many Democrats are encouraged about the general election chances versus Trump. I don’t think we should be.
Remember, this guy who is supposedly so beatable in a general election also had absolutely no chance to win the Republican nomination, but . . .
The country is polarized, and there are a lot of people whose votings decisions are fixed, regardless of who the candidates are. No matter who the nominees are, it will come down to the usual dynamic: there will be some sort of attack on the Dem that outrages the party faithful. It may resonate (Swift Boat) or not (Muslim); the Dem will have actually have to play defense (Obama) or not (Kerry);and will have to make an appeal of their own.
Then it will come down to a small slice of wing voters in some combination of Florida, Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, and Virginia, and someone will will a relatively close election.
I was recently in Orlando talking to a first generation immigrant from Peru. He was as ardent a Trump supporter as you would meet anywhere in the country. His primary reason “He’s not a politician”.
‘ always the negative vibe, Moriarity” DONALD SUTHERLAND
Jeeeeesh !
Fred Rich LaRiccia
Maybe he is or maybe he’s a Republican. I dunno, but a deals a deal-Don Rickles
” a deal deal ” 🙂 DON RICKLES
I laughed my ass off when they cut the Nazi tank commander in on the gold loot for blowing open the bank.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
I’m proud to stand with my fellow Wellesley College graduate c/o 1969, Hillary Clinton! She is ready to take the oval on day one. I appreciate your thoughts, Fred.
Jennifer Migliore
Democratic Candidate for State Rep
9th Essex
Saugus – Wakefield – Lynn
Wellesley c/o 2014
my next State Rep. And I know that her sister Wellesley College alum, Hillary, is proud of her too.
Why ? Because she fights for what she believes in — our progressive cause.
And I want all my BMG friends to know that she started knocking doors weeks ago in sub freezing weather. She is our voice for change moving us
all forward together.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
.
It gets confusing sometimes.
What about this ‘superpredators’ quote. It seems to me she’s speaking about street gangs here. What’s wrong with that?
It seems to me that this clip has been taken out of context.
Superpredators has been a loaded term that was used to reference black urban teens, and “bring them to heel” is just as bad.
This was so blatant that I don’t even think we can call it a dog whistle. Everyone knew *EXACTLY* who Hillary was talking about when she said this in 1996. No revisionist history.
She apologized for those words 20 years ago.
Have you ever told a lie ? I have.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
I haven’t seen it. She issued a statement yesterday, and while she said she regretted the words, she didn’t apologize.
she called gang members who recruit black children superpredators.
Do you really think all black children are gang members ?
Fred Rich LaRiccia
I heard the speech then as well.
She was talking about urban gangs. “Everyone” that I knew — including the black leaders of my community — knew that she was referring to street gangs, and strongly supported her.
Hillary Clinton and her husband have been a friend of minority communities for their entire adult lives. I don’t know where you’re getting this, but it is starkly dissonant with my recollection of the time.
Let’s please try to keep some semblance of courtesy and history here.
If you can’t see the racial undertones in the word, you’re not looking very hard. She was talking about young black and brown boys in cities in the years after ‘white flight,’ African American and Latino, certainly not white boys in suburbs. Treyvon Martin was the kid people were thinking about when she was talking about “superpredators,” not George Zimmerman, and certainly not nice suburban middle class white guys… like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.
It was deeply racist and flawed term, that bore no truth in reality.
We can say a lot of people thought then like Hillary Clinton did, and that’s certainly true — and, certainly, more than would admit still think like that now, but just wouldn’t openly say so. I’m glad Hillary isn’t one of the latter. That’s important, and that’s real.
But it doesn’t erase the past, and doesn’t make up for the tens of thousands of lives the Clintons destroyed with their mass incarceration policies. That’s not a whoopsie, not when so many have had their lives destroyed for doing things that the same number of white guys do, but don’t go to jail for.
If she and Bill only said something like this once, we could certainly chalk it up to a big misunderstanding, or unfortunate word use. Or if this sort of thing was rare and strictly limited to the mass incarceration issue, maybe I’d have a little more forgiveness in my heart.
Yet, that’s just not the case. It was very deliberate, part of a systemic pattern in the Clinton administration. They were wide users of the dog whistle.
And this is all clearly stuff they still think about in modern times when they’re trying to win votes, and still engaged in as recently as her previous campaign for President.
I don’t think the Democratic Party should elect candidates who have been historic users of the Dog Whistle, destroyed lives to show how tough they were on the African American community, and now want to claim some mantle of social justice champions.
It just strains all credibility, and I think people should find it offensive. We should all know what she meant then, and should all know the kinds of other dog whistle politics the Clintons engaged in throughout their entire careers. It is all on the record, for anyone with open eyes.
…the African-American population are overwhelmingly loyal to the Clintons. Toni Morrison even called Bill the first black President due to their mutual affinity. Please don’t try to read minds. Unless she said all those black kids are superpredators I don’t want to hear it.
It doesn’t mean what you think it means.
Tom and I have had several exchanges over the years regarding what constitutes racism. I think it’s fair to say from that experience that if he’s not seeing racism, it probably isn’t there.
she said she shouldn’t have said this, and wouldn’t say this today.
she did not apologize for saying it, however, and she’s not proposing to roll back or reform many of the harmful policies she supported as First Lady that have disproportionately harmed African Americans and other minorities.
Superpredators come in all races, and frankly to automatically equate that with a certain race says more about the listener’s racial assumptions than the speaker’s. It’s a hard truth and runs against other values, but unfortunately a few people do seem to be beyond redemption. She HAS spoken out about mass incarceration in her current campaign, but one corollary to my impatience with the purists is my impatience with people who don’t remember the politics of the 1990s. Rightly or wrongly being tough on crime was politic back then and Clinton’s crime program as I recall also included stricter gun controls and the much-maligned “midnight basketball”.
To say otherwise is utter nonsense.
n/t
She began her campaign discussing criminal justice reform, even before Bernie did, and Bill Clinton apologized for his policies admitting they are making the problem far worse. These were bipartisan policies voted overwhelmingly by nearly all members of Congress. Including Bernie Sanders.
Does this make them good? Or wise? Or fair? Does this bely the fact that they hurt blacks more than whites? Made their lives worse? Absolutely not. They were a horrid mistake, just like our Iraq policy under the last four presidents, including our current one. And while a small minority had the foresight to oppose them at the time, a far larger majority is now ready to overturn the damage having learned this lesson.
But this is why black lives matter is so important since it has changed the conversation, redirected our outrage and made it politically safe to criticize the police again and push for stronger protections against their abuses of the black community. Many whites were unaware of this and shootings like LaQuan McDonald were likely a sad and frequent occurence buried by the police and a complicit media. Now they won’t be, and that’s how change happens.
and I said many because I was accounting for mass incarceration, though I am deeply troubled that her campaign is still benefiting from the private prison lobby, making it hard to trust her words.
but, yes, that was an error on my part — and I’ve been much clearer about it making similar points in posts/comments elsewhere.
My bad.
There’s no “there” there regarding #WhichHIllary. Now you come across as just looking for an excuse to oppose her.
JESUS
Have you ever made a mistake ? I have.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
…and believe it is worthy of consideration when judging people, but do you have a Gospel citation for it because it does not at all sound familiar as something Jesus said and I can’t find a reference (though I suppose I’ll take a non-canonical reference if I have to)?
As a voracious reader since my youth that I credit my late teacher Mom — for years now I have been compiling my own book of favorite quotes.
This is my only quote from Jesus though truth be told — even though I am a humanist — he has always been a great inspiration to me. As a boy attending private parochial school I read the Bible both Old and New Testaments and can cite many verses.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
I make mistakes lots of times. I may forget to mark something on my calendar, or misread something and reply the wrong way.
My mistakes don’t terribly damage, ruin the lives of or kill millions of people.
Hillary Clinton’s “mistakes” have.
Saying these are “just mistakes” discounts the lives of the millions of people who have been directly harmed by them.
Susan Sarandon:
Clinton is running on her extensive record of experience. Why is she having to ‘evolve’ on so many of the decisions that she made while gaining that experience? Bernie has not been ‘evolving’ at anything like the rate she has. I question Clinton’s judgement.
… This year I am a shameless snake in terms of the Democratic primary. I love Bernie Sanders to an extent, that it kind of makes me crazy to hear Hillary people tear him down with an attitude of disparagement or dismissal. But I also actually resent it when Bernie people are disrespectful of the incredible accomplishments of this brilliant woman. This post by fredrichlaricchia deserves tremendous respect. He lays out the case for Hillery in a comprehensive and compelling way. But please everyone: this year we are obliged to fight the lies and literally protect our own lives. I sometimes think that Americans have lost sight of the fact that sometimes when you make a mistake and politics, you don’t get a second chance. Politics is not near entertainment as everyone on the site knows. A chill wind blows. We must all come together and nurture a responsive fire that will take the wrathful energy of that flame, harness that wind, and instead preserve the fragile warmth of our constitutional democracy- so rare in history. These people are dangerous. We need to commit to cooling the rhetoric on our side so we get our friends to understand that we all must come together in the Fall. I respect Fred Rich Laricchia for publicly making that commitment. Does everyone on this site pledge to support the Democratic nominee in the Fall?
I read as many positive posts as I can find. It’s getting harder each day.
N/T
Why should we be “hysterical” when we recognition the role Hillary Clinton played in destroying the middle east, the death of hundreds of thousands of lives and the waste of trillions of dollars? Why should we be “hysterical” when we recognize the role of the Clintons in making extreme childhood poverty — children in families who live on less than $2 a day — more than double, or their role in creating the new Jim Crow, mass incarceration?
Why should we be “hysterical” by recognizing their role in deregulating the banks, causing the Great Recession, which has wiped out huge swaths of what little wealth the Middle Class and struggling families had?
These were not policies Ronald Reagan or either Bush passed. They were policies Bill Clinton passed and Hillary Clinton strongly argued for. Many of them are things Hillary Clinton still supports today.
Democrats should be deeply ashamed of the Clintons, not celebrate them. We should make them pariahs in the party as rank and file Labour members have to Tony Blair in the UK, not welcome them to another term. They have been a disaster to the American people. There’s no other way of putting it. Electing them can only widen the scope of and deepen their damage.
This rhetoric is so overheated and I cannot believe think for a second that you sincerely think it’s true. Didn’t you vote for her in 2008? Fix yourself some tea and turn on some Tchaikovsky, spring is around the corner and it’ll be a busy campaign season come summer.
People who are angry are apparently the ones with the problem, not the people who vote for wars with no legitimate justification, or who support coups of democratically elected governments, or who pushed for mass incarceration, or policies that doubled childhood poverty.
Yup, people like me are wrong because we’re angry. How indecent of us. The oligarchs destroying the world aren’t the problem, because they’re so very polite about it.
.
Attacking anyone with a cross word doesn’t help your candidate.
If you’re seeking personal satisfaction, you’re doing a fine job of it. If you’re hoping to convince a waverer to support Sen. Sanders, you’re failing.
Even if one is eager or willing to vote for Ms. Clinton and even if we do succeed in getting her elected to the Presidency, the issues Rye is raising here are real ones and a second President Clinton would require watching — just as the first President Clinton required watching.
In the imperfect world where we reside, there are no blameless, messianic heroes — however much we might yearn for them. Elections resemble mini-television series about how the special savior person is going to right injustices and spread love and higher GDP. These miniseries always end in disappointment: The hero or heroine either disappoints on election day or disappoints once in office. There’s always great hope but it there is always disappointment too.
Now certainly, one might need a great deal of pumping oneself up to knock on doors or make phone calls. Maybe it is simpler to think of Mr Sanders or Ms Clinton as embodiments of the closest human approximation to perfection — with mistakes that are either forgivable or negligible or both. This may be why some movements foster cults of personality.
I prefer we not bully healthy skepticism with blind worship.
I completely agree with you there are no political messiahs, especially at the presidential level. In 2008 I thought I finally found mine and he has made many compromises I disagree with, some he was forced to, others that were unforced errors. Just like any human being in the political realm.
Hillary has made her fair share of mistakes and unforced errors. Rye has done a good job pointing them out in past posts, but here he crossed a line from skepticism into demonization. Do I agree with him that her policies on Iraq and mass incarceration were severely flawed and marr her progressive record? Absolutely. But these mistakes are genuine error, not the callous disregard for black lives or human rights he made them out to be.
She didn’t forget to put something in her calendar. She didn’t write down the wrong address on an envelope. She didn’t accidentally speed, thinking the speed limit was 65 when it was 55.
She voted for a war based on lies that has killed over a million people and destabilized an entire region.
She dealt a crushing blow to the social safety net that has doubled extreme childhood poverty — kids living in families living on less than $2 a day. (In America!!)
She helped create mass incarceration, which Michelle Alexander has so aptly described as the new Jim Crow.
She has supported banking deregulation, which has nearly destroyed the world’s economy, and strip-mined what little wealth the middle class and struggling families managed to save.
These were not little oopsies. She didn’t forget to get the milk before she came home. She didn’t miscount the money she handed to a cashier, trying to buy some coffee. She didn’t have a brain fart and type one word, meaning another. She didn’t forget someone’s name, or she and her husband’s anniversary. She didn’t accidentally let slip a surprise party for Chelsea.
She has vigorously supported all of the worst policies that have caused the most devastation to our world and country today.
No mistakes, no unforced errors, just a politician who has an honesty problem who’s been on the wrong side of the issues for just about her entire career, to terrible effect.
I agree with you — and so does Ms. Clinton today — that the vote on the war was wrong. Were you equally passionate in condemning candidate John Kerry? He voted the same way.
Ms. Clinton has been on the front lines of combat with an out-of-control GOP doing all in its power to drag this nation into the sewers of the Ku Klux Klan and worse. While she’s been doing that, what was Mr. Sanders doing?
When she was “creating the crushing blow to the social safety net”, what was the alternative on the table? Was that alternative better or worse than what we got? Where was Mr. Sanders in that fight?
I’m sick to death of unsubstantiated allegations about “an honesty problem” — that’s a recycled sound bite from the likes of Newt Gingrich or Ken Starr. Meanwhile, the reason Mr. Sanders doesn’t have a similar list of things he would have done differently given a choice is that HE DIDN’T DO VERY MUCH. I’m not criticizing him for that, not every legislator can be out on the front lines for every fight. Nevertheless, the main reason we don’t have an analogous list of “issues” for Mr. Sanders is that he’s been a relatively obscure back-bencher from a relatively obscure New England state. How much attention does ANYBODY pay to the Vermont primary?
Until he began this campaign, the main claim to fame of Mr. Sanders has been that he’s been “the Socialist that caucuses with the Democrats”.
Hillary Clinton is not Satan incarnate. Bernie Sanders is not the Chosen One come to bring salvation. Each is a CANDIDATE. Each brings strengths and weaknesses. One of them will be the Democratic nominee. Each is far superior to any of the GOP candidates.
Please save your vitriol for Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, or whichever ignorant, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, misogynistic liar the GOP nominates.
He was not supporting NAFTA. He was not supporting TPP. He was not supporting DOMA. He was not supporting Clinton’s “welfare reform”. He was not supporting the Iraq War. He was not supporting Wall Street. He was not taking huge sums of money from the health insurance corporations and he was not giving $225,000 “speeches” to Goldman Sachs.
I already stipulated that.
I asked what was he DOING?
It sounds like you agree that the answer is “not much”.
I hardly think that’s “not much.”
He also passed one of the only truly bipartisan bills in his vet reform bill in the Senate, one that took years of embarrassing the Republicans to get done, in the midst of the biggest vet scandal in my memory.
Hillary Clinton named a post office, highway and got a little cash for a state park.
When comparing Clinton’s record with Bernie’s in the only way they can directly compare — legislatively — it is no comparison. Bernie was the far better legislator in getting things done, including bipartisan things, and he’s the only one who proved he could stand up to intense pressure or the special, moneyed interests that Hillary.
or something to that effect
I feel the same way about Kerry on this issue. The vote was a disaster, and also something that was clear to be a disaster and also the wrong course at the time. Almost all the high profile Dems in the Senate voted for the resolution. I think many or most of them did it out of fear given the political climate. Being seen as soft on defense was too risky, especially for people like Kerry who was considering a run for the White House. It seems we have to accept grossly negligent and dangerous misjudgment or perverse realpolitik. Neither of those are satisfactory to me. And this wasn’t a vote on a transportation bill, it was a vote authorizing war (and please no one bring up the bullshit “declaring war” distinction because that is not relevant in the modern era). If you believe the case for war, I can’t trust your judgment. If you voted for political reasons while knowing that war was a bad option, you don’t deserve any office, let alone the highest one.
And also getting more amendments passed than any legislator, which is especially impressive when he never had the same access to party leadership and major committee roles as party-line towing Democrats.
You could look it up, if BMG’s old threads were still available. I went on the record here, and directly to his staff (because he was unavailable to those of us who stood with him when he was an antiwar figure), that his Iraq vote had cost him my vote forever. I got criticized here for being “single-issue,” which is BS, in the same way that Clinton’s calling Sanders “single-issue” is BS. Kerry and Clinton were complicit in a catastrophically bad action that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. They did it with their eyes open. They don’t get to say “oops,” as though it was a mistake.
Great. So you opposed John Kerry. America elected George W. Bush for a second term.
Are you happy with that outcome?
The outcome was that he lost to the worst president in modern history. Neither my vote nor yours had any effect whatsoever on that; it was all him. You also mischaracterize my efforts. I did not “oppose John Kerry” in the general election, I just didn’t vote for him. I did write that he was not the best candidate for the primary.
I hear you. I apologize for sounding prickly.
It is true that a consequence of living in the great state of Massachusetts is that our votes on nearly all federal ballots mean absolutely nothing.
…that even that vote disqualifies someone forever and I also don’t agree with the affirmative vote on AUMF, plenty of people definitely objected at the time. They were called Deaniacs. It’s another example of refusing to remember the political context in which that vote was taken, and no, don’t throw Ted Kennedy at me – he wasn’t thinking about the presidency and perfectly safe in his own seat.
Dean was not at all the leader of that movement. 42% of Democratic Senators and 60% of Democratic Congressman voted against the use of force. What are you talking about? Dean wasn’t known nationally until more than a year after the vote.
Yes, I remember the context. Many Dems were scared to be viewed as weak on defense, especially those gearing up for a Presidential run in 2004, so they voted FOR A FREAKING WAR that was so obviously dubious and easily foreseen to be a disaster. You obviously have no issue with that. I think that kind of political decision is literally the worst thing an elected official can do. Shrugging that off as politics is disgusting, and apologies now don’t nearly make up for the trillions spent, hundreds of thousands killed, and the ongoing conflict and threats.
…since you seemed to skeptically ask if he were as harsh on Kerry. She has also argued that she thought the authorization would strengthen Bush’s hand to get a real coalition that would ultimately temper some of the more extreme action. (I don’t remember it quite right so don’t blame my confusion on her.) Even though I opposed I’m not sure it was obvious either. I opposed mostly timing when we should have focused on Afghanistan, but on its own I wish we had just finished off Saddam the first time around.
Fighting against the out-of-control Republicans… *and* the corrupt establishment Democrats? You know, the Democrats who deregulated the banks and caused the Great Recession? The ones who dealt a crushing blow to the social safety net, the likes of which Ronald Reagan and GHWB could only dream of? The ones who supported the Iraq war, PATRIOT Act, tax cuts for the rich, the DC-Wall St revolving door and so on and so forth?
How busy has Hillary Clinton been ‘fighting the Republicans’ when she was taking money hand over fist from Wall St? Was she taking on the Republicans when she supported the coup in Hondorus, or was it when she joined with the Republicans to make sure we could still sell clusterbombs to every whacko dictator who sells us oil?
The idea that Hillary has been out there leading the fight against the Republicans is laughable when all too often during her career (and even before then, as a Goldwater Girl) she’s helped Republicans do things Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren would find unconscionable, often things Ronald Reagan could only dream of.
How about this? TO NOT FUCKING PASS TANF. No alternative was necessary. We had a law since FDR, one that was highly effective at combating childhood poverty, and 8 years of Ronald Reagan and 4 years of GHWB didn’t kill it. Bill Clinton did, with the firm backing of Hillary, who very publicly argued in favor of TANF. Had they really, truly wanted reform, there was no reason on earth it had to be so destructive as TANF, which went out of its way to be painfully and sadistically cruel — for example, forever cutting off ex-cons from any kind of safety net, like food stamps, and forcing parents in public housing to choose between eviction or barring their children coming home from jail from sleeping in their old bedroom (which would, in effect, force many of them back into jail — can’t be on parole without a roof over your head).
Wherever did I say she was? That’s for the good lord to decide. My decision is on Tuesday, and in my firm opinion Hillary Clinton belongs no where near the White House. She and her husband have done plenty enough damage there as it is.
They are all deserving of my vitriol. So is someone who voted for Iraq. So is someone who supported coups of democratically elected governments as Secretary of State. So is someone who did so much to push for the banking deregulation that destroyed what little wealth the middle class and struggling families had. And so is someone who supported a policy that has doubled extreme childhood poverty — and tripled it in families with single mothers.
My mother was a single parent. We had very little growing up. Not poverty by any means, but very working class. I can’t abide by what Hillary Clinton did to poverty-stricken single parents. I just can’t. It was a betrayal.
I’m glad that you’ll be voting in the primary. I have no problem with your passionate commitment to Bernie Sanders.
I hope that after the primary, you will join me in enthusiastically supporting whomever our nominee is.
The final line of ryepower’s comment is a link, which includes this:
An abomination. Not a mistake.
Not sure what you are trying to accomplish here. Hillary is clearly going to beat Bernie, so you are either going to have suck it up and support her or sit on the sidelines.
While Hillary is far from perfect, do you still not think that she will be about 1000 times better than anyone likely to run against her on the Republican side?
There is nothing wrong with being angry, per se, but is it really accomplishing anything useful here?
Sanders himself said it best in a recent debate: “On our worst day, the two of us are 100 times better than anyone the other side has to offer.” That was BEFORE the most recent GOP debate and its aftermath that is starting to look less and less distinguishable from an episode of Jerry Springer.
“I love Bernie Sanders to an extent, that it kind of makes me crazy to hear Hillary people tear him down with an attitude of disparagement or dismissal.”
What does one have to do with the other? Why do you only like Bernie “to an extent” because he and his supporters are critical of someone you like? How is that different than tribalism?
I don’t dislike Hillary Clinton because I like Bernie. I dislike Hillary Clinton because she has terrible judgment, she lies, and she seeks to maintain the status quo — which is slowly (or quickly, in some cases) ruining the lives of tens of millions of people across America, and depressing 90% of the population.
I have weighed the candidates individually, and Bernie is the clear choice. Unlike Hillary Clinton, he’s spent his life fighting for people like me. Hillary Clinton has spent her life doing great damage to people like me, and then, come election time, pretending otherwise.
Honestly,I was growing tired of the negativity in both camps.
I had an epiphany watching Hillary having a revealing conversation this morning with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brezinski and I was moved to tears at her quiet sadness and sincerity.
She confided about the pain and scars that the personal attacks had taken over the years and her genuine empathy for people who suffer. She is afraid that she will let folks down if she fails.
Listening to her and watching the danger rising on the right I couldn’t help but think of Jefferson’s words on the sin of slavery : ” When I consider there is a just God I tremble for my nation.”
Fred Rich LaRiccia
What about the hundreds of thousands of people who have been cruelly locked away by her policies? What about the millions of people who lost their homes and any wealth they had because of the crash that occurred due to their deregulation? What about the thousands of families across America who lost loved ones in Iraq, and the millions who have lost them in Iraq and Syria?
Her “quiet sadness?” She’s destroyed the lives or millions of people, and she’s complaining about people being angry about that? She should be ashamed.
…you said not a word about this whole “superpredator” nonsense until it became a meme within the last few days. You’re just digging in your heels and stomping your feet, damaging your own credibility in the process.
maybe not on BMG, but that is not the limit of where I type or speak my words.
As for my credibility, what am I wrong about? What fact have I been mistaken about? I’m occasionally a polemic, but I always keep my arguments firmly routed in the facts.
Far too much thought is given toward politeness. You can be a beloved war criminal in this world as long as you’re polite — just ask Hillary’s close friend and confidant, Henry Kissinger.
You know what I think about that? We have far too many polite people in this world. We need a lot more angry ones. It ain’t the time for polite words, it’s time for the pitchforks.
Have you ever been wrong about anything ? What makes you so morally superior than the rest of us ?
What gives you the right to condemn with such certitude, hell fire and brimstone ?
Or put another way, who elected you God ?
Fred Rich LaRiccia
This ad hominem outburst adds nothing to our understanding.
it’s not an oopsie, or a small error, and not a simple matter of being ‘wrong.’
She didn’t get a problem wrong on a test, or forget to bring pick up the dry cleaning.
She voted to kill people on a massive scale without any kind of legitimate justification. She’s supported coups of democratically elected governments. She’s pushed for policies that have destabilized entire regions.
My condemnation is based on nothing but the facts. If there’s any fire and brimstone here, it’s only what she’s voted to rain down on Iraq.
That is the truth, and nothing but the truth.
I’m trying to think of what government you’re thinking of here.
http://www.salon.com/2015/06/08/exclusive_hillary_clinton_sold_out_honduras_lanny_davis_corporate_cash_and_the_real_story_about_the_death_of_a_latin_america_democracy/
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/09/24/hillary-clinton-emails-and-honduras-coup
https://theintercept.com/2015/07/06/clinton-honduras-coup/
You did use the plural. Was there a second democratically elected government?
but yes, government.
I’m as revolutionary as the next guy.
You write “It ain’t the time for polite words, it’s time for the pitchforks”.
Can you please offer an example of when “the pitchforks” brought about constructive change? I say that because the image that immediately comes to my mind is a mob surging against Frankenstein’s castle (a metaphor about the conflict between science and humanity).
I think the way that anger helps is a metaphorical good-cop/bad-cop routine. Angry black organizations helped advance Civil Rights legislation because they helped Congress and the voters see that MLK and the proposed Civil Rights legislation were more appealing than cities on fire.
I know this is hard to accept, but I fear you forget that at the time that DOMA was being enacted, there was growing support for a constitutional amendment to explicitly enshrine homophobia into the constitution. As bad as DOMA was, it seems to me that it was preferable to what was likely to happen without it.
I agree that we need more angry people, out in the streets. I suggest that we ALSO need more people in office who have the willingness, skills and discipline to do the hard, mind-numbingly boring, and often unpopular things that have to be done to accomplish genuine transformation.
While the threat of pitchforks is sometimes helpful, the reality is that they almost always do far more harm than good.
the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Suffrage Movement, the Gay Rights movement in the 2000s, FDR’s New Deal, and, of course, the whole reason why we aren’t beholden to some queen on the other side of the Atlantic, the American Revolution.
Dare I say it, Black Lives Matter is on its way to some major victories by taking no names, and Fight for 15 and the Dreamers are changing minds everyday, too, with victories likely ahead — sooner rather than later.
Economic inequality is greater now than at any point since the Gilded Age, and the only way to change that is a widespread, angry movement. So, yes, it’s time to get out the mother fing pitchforks.
I enthusiastically and whole-heartedly agree with you about Black Lives Matter. I’m not sure I’d characterize them as “pitch forks”, but I surely agree with what they are doing.
I also want to remind you that they became a player in this campaign when they disrupted a Bernie Sanders campaign event.
You and I are in VIOLENT AGREEMENT about the importance of the issue of wealth and income concentration.
We are also in violent agreement about the importance of groups like ActUP and BLM in using real disturbances and real disruptions.
My point is that, as we learned to our chagrin with the short-lived Occupy movement, effective activism must go beyond that. “Pitchforks”, by themselves, generally provoke bloodbaths (the French Revolution comes to mind).
I think we need groups like BLM (and I said so here, as Bernie Sanders support, when the above-linked episode happened). I think we also need effective sausage-makers in office to turn that energy into actual change.
That’s an aspect of what I mean by the good-cop/bad-cop routine. The Black Panther movement played a crucial role in civil rights, and SDS played a crucial role in ending the Vietnam war.
I did not literally mean that people should pick up pitchforks, or make a call to (literal) arms, just that we need a political revolution in this country, one where the people rise up in anger and drive the elite establishment out.
And I listed all the political revolutions where that has happened, because apparently all too many have forgotten about them.
And they were radical actions, all of them, overcoming not just the opposition, but the ‘supportive’ naysayers who say they’re on the right side of things and yet block progress at every stage because radical action feels uncomfortable to them. In my firm opinion, it’s those ‘supportive’ naysayers who end up killing more movements than the opposition, as useful fools for the elite.
I’m not sure who you are responding to. I dare say I have as much scar-tissue as anybody here from my own participation in disruptive events.
I’m attempting to remind you that today’s world is chock full of people who have explicitly promised to “block progress at every stage”. Hillary Clinton is NOT among those.
I had no idea that the Obama administration was so much worse than its predecessor.
That “interview” was a staged infomercial for the corporate candidate on corporate media. I was moved to tears at how pathetic our Fourth Estate has become.
Here’s another one, this time a paraphrase put into quotes:
The real quote (which actually is written in stone):
I speculate that Fred is generating these things from memory. Apparently, his memory is not up to the task.
“For me this is a season of hope — new hope for a justice and fair prosperity for the many, and not just for the few — new hope.
And this is the cause of my life — new hope that we will break the old gridlock and guarantee that every American — north, south, east, west, young, old — will have decent, quality health care as a fundamental right and not a privilege.”
Ted Kennedy 2008
“People who have health emergencies can’t wait for us to have a theoretical debate about some better idea that will never, ever come to pass.”
Hillary Clinton 2016
And please, release the transcripts.
I don’t know if you’re a parent or not.
I’ll tell you that if I’m a parent and my child is in the midst of a health emergency, the words of Ms. Clinton are a LOT more appealing to me than the platitudes of Mr. Kennedy (who, by the way, epitomized being a child of wealth).
I categorically pledge to enthusiastically support the Democratic nominee for President, whoever it is.
I am intrigued by the assertion that Clinton will appoint justices to overturn Citizens United.
What the decision said was that there was no legal justification to allow labor unions to make political donations as groups while denying business interests the ability to do the same.
So what would an reversal look like? Some pigs are more equal than others? How do you legally justify status quo ante, which gave unions special political privileges?
I am a fan of individual-only donations, which I think would get obscene amounts of money out of politics, proto, but I am curious what kind of rationale….excuse, cough, cough…a Clinton appointee would use.
…both businesses and unions could donate directly to campaigns through PACs, which is still true. The difference now is that both types of corporations (and remember both are types of INCORPORATED entities) can fund their own ads saying “Vote for X” instead of the not-so-subtle “Call X and tell him you disapprove of…” I’m pretty sure that absent a PAC neither can actually donate to campaigns or parties even now. I agree with preference for individual only, but this is not the first time you have searched in vain for a business/union double standard that does not exist and never has.
Liberal dems love to pick up the “corporations are not people” thing because it makes a great bumper sticker, especially if you have no idea what you are talking about. In the actual real world, if I have free speech, and you have free speech, there really isn’t any justifiable reason that you and I have diminished free speech rights if we act together, even if we act together with a large number of other people as well.
The thing that they are all upset about is the notion that corporations, in particular, have the ability to speak with an amplifier because the amplifier costs money that they are able to pay. The real issue isn’t so much that “corporations are people” but that “money equals speech.”
I’m not sure if that issue is actually any better than the other, but it seems like it is more arguable than the corporation thing to me. If I hear someone yapping about “corporations aren’t people” I usually hear “I don’t know anything other than what I read on the Daily Kos.”
…that at the time CU came out I actually defended SCOTUS’s reasoning on first amendment grounds, but given what I see as the damage to our system I now favor a constitutional amendment that would say something like, “Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to prohibit Congress or any state legislature from regulating monetary contributions or expenditures intended to influence the outcome of an election.”
but I believe you. Your concept would certainly address the problem that people are attempting to address without otherwise effing up the 1st Amendment, I think.
It ain’t that common that we agree; so a happy weekend to you.