Ready The Clown Car: The First Batch of Democrats Are Ready To Announce Their 2020 Bids

she is certainly due. and no one is paying attention to her anymore whatsoever

 

Go home Poco.

 

Yeah, her not dropping out after NH is just odd. Not sure what she's trying to accomplish.

Pete, Warren, and Amy all need to go as well, and Bloomy after super Tuesday if he doesn't out win Biden.

It seems like a bunch of selfish people to me, just trying to advance their careers. If there is no pathway to a plurality of delegates, or winning the nomination, drop out.

 

Tulsi has gone the Kucinich route.

1% in most states and she'll garner more support as others drop out but will stick it out until she's out of money or there's a delegate lock candidate.

 

I suspect, timing wise, for Pete he was promised something in a Biden administration. That and his advisors were likely warning him the Super Tuesday results were going to be very bad.

 

today is the real turning point of the campaign. . . and the beginning of the end for Bernie I think

 

Nate Silver is a leftist?

 

Man Trump really doesn't want to face Bernie huh.

 

More like the opposite. Can you not comprehend rhetorical statements?

 

Dude I think Donald Trump is a dufus, like grade A certified dumbass. But if there is one thing he is good at its marketing and understanding audiences.

Why the **** would Trump openly state he wants Bernie to be the nominee if he knows that 99% of the DNC electorate DESPISES him? Trump stating that Bernie deserves the nomination only hurts Bernie's chances. It's pretty damn ****ing obvious. If you're Joe Biden's ad campaign manager, you make an ad displaying Trump's desire for facing Bernie.

I remember Obama making jokes about being afraid of endorsing GOP politicians he genuinely liked because he was afraid endorsing them would hurt their changes in their respective red district or state.

 

Why does it matter if Minny is in super tuesday, if she does win in her home state what does that mean?

How does she benefit from that?

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/politic...ers-joe-biden-enriched-their-families/607159/

The Sanders and Biden Families Have Been Cashing In for Years

 

I don't think it is a matter or Trump having a preference (in this text) as much as it is him getting in on the ground floor of Sanders likely not getting the nomination and labeling it as fraudulent in an effort to get Sander's voters to not vote for Biden. It is very bright...... transparent but bright.

 

Sanders put his wife on the Burlington city payroll and made a company of hers, Progressive Media Strategies, a top recipient of campaign cash. His congressional reelection campaigns paid one of his stepdaughters more than $50,000 over four years; a nonprofit his wife started, the Sanders Institute, paid her son, David Driscoll, a $100,000 salary. Biden has a sister and son whose companies received large contracts from his last presidential campaign; about one-fifth of the $11.1 million raised by that campaign went to companies that employed close relatives.

Yet the ethics of the practice are clear: “It is unsavory for politicians to be making payments to their family members when there are other alternatives out there,” Robert Maguire, the research director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonpartisan good-government group, told me.



Neither Michelle Obama nor Hillary Clinton were paid by their husbands’ campaigns or the federal government. Maya Harris advised her sister, Kamala, during her presidential campaign, but was unpaid. Other candidates in the 2020 race regularly leaned on family members to appear with them or on their behalf on the campaign trail. Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren never had family members on their payroll. Amy Klobuchar’s campaign has reimbursed her husband for $1,058.22 in expenses. One of Mike Bloomberg’s daughters worked for him early in his time as mayor, but she was unpaid. Tom Steyer had never run for office before this year.

Neither the Bidens nor the Sanderses have gone as far as Trump.

The Biden and Sanders practices, even when “juxtaposed with the outright profiteering of the Trump administration,” are also potential examples of nepotism, Maguire said. “It’s not a direct comparison, but it does make it more difficult for people to levy criticisms of him.”

The main instance of Sanders paying family members is the close professional ties he has had with his wife, Jane Sanders, for decades. He didn’t have much money before he was elected mayor of Burlington, in a surprise 1981 victory—it was the first full-time job he’d held in years. His first act in office was creating a youth-services department, and he immediately put in charge the woman he’d begun dating at his victory party, giving her a corner office on the third floor of city hall. At first, she worked as a volunteer youth coordinator, but later she began raising money that would then be used to pay her a salary.


“For a man who once proclaimed himself an enemy of patronage, Mayor Bernard Sanders has done a remarkable turnaround on the issue in a relatively short time,” the Free Press complained in a 1983 editorial. That same year, Sanders responded. “I’m tired of hearing innuendo, especially regarding Jane,” he said. “If she is not competent to do the job, I want to hear someone say it. Cronyism is hiring people for specific jobs because they are friends and not because they are qualified. If someone can explain to me that Jane is not qualified for the job, I’ll listen to them.”

In 2004, Burlington College hired Jane as its president. While she was in that role, the college entered into a $500,000 contract for student activities with Vermont Woodworking School, which was run by Jane’s daughter Carina Driscoll. The contract ended shortly after Jane left the college, in 2011. The college shut down the next year, drowned in financial troubles resulting from a multimillion-dollar loan that Jane had obtained to purchase land for its new campus. The FBI later investigated the deal for alleged fraud, but no charges were ever brought. Jane received a $200,000 severance package that Sanders’s Senate financial disclosure describes as having been for a “sabbatical.” Jeff Weaver, a top adviser to Sanders, has previously told the press that Jane did nothing wrong. Jane, through the campaign, declined to comment.

Starting in the late ’90s, Jane was an alternative commissioner on the Texas Low Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission—a gubernatorial-appointed position on a commision that had been created after Sanders led efforts to dump nuclear waste in a small border town named Sierra Blanca. Jane, who didn’t have experience with nuclear-waste or land issues, was paid roughly $5,000 annually. Not listed on Sanders’s financial disclosures, the payments first came to light when he released several years of their joint federal tax returns in 2016. Sanders’s state tax returns might have more information—but so far, he hasn’t released them, even though he relented last spring and released federal returns that he’d been withholding.

Sanders has also benefited from his campaign account over the years, spending $8,000 in the late ’90s, and then $445,000 in 2015, on purchases of his own book. In his 2016 Senate personal financial disclosure, Sanders said he received only $6,700 in royalties from the 2015 purchase. Other politicians do this—but when, for example, the Republican National Committee bought Donald Trump Jr.’s book in bulk last year, the author didn’t also profit off money raised in his name, with his own authority to spend it.


In 2017, Jane started the Sanders Institute, envisioned as part think tank, part advocacy group. She tapped her son David Driscoll, who had worked as an executive at two private companies, as executive director, and he was approved by the board. He hadn’t worked for a nonprofit before, but was paid a salary of $100,000. The institute raised about $1.2 million, according to tax returns and public statements it released. But neither its full donor list nor the number of donations it received is public. Bernie and Jane Sanders said that they made a $25,000 initial donation, and Our Revolution gave a $105,000 loan. The organization shut down after Sanders began his second race for president; most of its paperwork remains undisclosed. The most significant thing the institute did was host a December 2018 gathering for top supporters and press in Vermont that was essentially an informal kickoff to his anticipated campaign.

 

classy use of gifs. I must say I'm amazed that Bernie started out his career as Buddy Holly.