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The state of the democratic party

Discussion in 'BBS Hangout: Debate & Discussion' started by Os Trigonum, Feb 27, 2021.

  1. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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    good one for this thread

     
  2. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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  3. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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  4. fchowd0311

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  5. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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    Democratic schism on display in Ohio special
    The battle to succeed HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge has turned into an expensive, all-out ideological war between moderates and progressives, pitting James Clyburn against AOC.

    https://www.nationaljournal.com/s/714402/democratic-schism-on-display-in-ohio-special/

    excerpt

    CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, Ohio —The battle for the soul of the Democratic Party is now centered on the streets of Cleveland in a special election that’s poised to signal its future ideological direction.

    A once-sleepy primary between a stalwart Bernie Sanders ally, former state Sen. Nina Turner, and Cuyahoga County Councilwoman Shontel Brown has suddenly turned into an all-out civil war between the party establishment and the progressive Left. Numerous national party figures, from Hillary Clinton to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the mother of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge (whose resignation opened up the seat), have made endorsements in the run-up to the Aug. 3 primary that will all but determine the next member of Congress in the Northeast Ohio district.
    more at the link
     
  6. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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  7. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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    https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/07/22/these_arent_the_democrats_of_old_146122.html

    These Aren't the Democrats of Old

    By Victor Davis Hanson
    July 22, 2021

    In the old days, Democrats had predictable agendas, supposedly focused on individual rights, the "little guy" and distrust of the military-industrial complex.

    The left, often on spec, blasted the wealthy, whether the "lucre" was self-made or inherited. The old-money rich were lampooned as idle drones. If the rich were self-made, they were deemed sellouts. A good example was '70s pop icon Jackson Brown's "The Pretender," with lyrics that railed about a "happy idiot" and his "struggle for the legal tender."

    Democrats talked nonstop about the "working man." They damned high gas and electricity prices that hurt consumers.

    Almost every liberal cause was couched in terms of the First Amendment, whether it was the right to shout obscenities, view p*rnography or bring controversial speakers to campus.

    The Supreme Court was sacred. With a liberal-packed court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, progressive justices restrained the supposedly harebrained initiatives of hick right-wing populists.

    Once upon a time, Democratic congressmen investigated the CIA and FBI seemingly nonstop. Progressive political cartoonists caricatured the Pentagon's top brass as obese, buffoonish-looking clerks with monstrous jowls. The "revolving door" was a particular leftist obsession. Democrats blasted generals who retired from the military, then went straight to defense contractor boards and got rich.

    For the left, elite professional sports were the opiates of the middle classes. Wannabe jocks supposedly wasted hours in front of the TV watching grown men toss around balls.

    Unions were sacred. So farm union kingpins such as Cesar Chavez headed to the border to confront (or physically assault) any would-be undocumented immigrant "scabs."

    Politicians such as Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Bill and Hillary Clinton railed against the cheap labor provided by undocumented immigrants, which drove down American wages.

    That was then; this is now.

    Liberals became rich progressives who transmogrified into really rich hardcore leftists. Suddenly, not just millionaires but multibillionaires such as Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jay-Z, Oprah Winfrey and a host of other celebrities and CEOs were cool and hip.

    Deified Silicon Valley monopolists ensured that leftist candidates were usually better funded than were conservatives. "Dirty money" disappeared from leftist invective.

    The Fortune 500 became mostly a list of billionaires who did not make their money the old-fashioned way of manufacturing, assembly, construction, farming, transportation, or oil and gas production.

    The left got drunk on the idea that it now had its hands on the money and influence in America. So it systematically began targeting institutions and leveraged them not from the noisy street with empty protests but from within.

    Suddenly, the once-revered Supreme Court, now with a majority of conservative justices, became an obstacle to democracy and had to be packed or restructured.

    The First Amendment was redefined as a bothersome speed bump that slowed progress. It needlessly protected noisy conservatives and their backward values.

    The CIA, FBI and Pentagon were suddenly OK -- if staffed with the right people. Their clandestine power, their chain-of-command exemption from messy legislative give-and-take and their reliance on surveillance were now pluses in the correct hands. These institutions became allies, not enemies, and so their powers were augmented and unchecked.

    Sports were cool, given that they offered a huge platform for the social-justice warriors among the athletes to damn the very system that had enriched them.

    The higher the gas and electricity prices, the better to shock the clueless bourgeoisie that their SUVs and home air conditioners were anti-green and on the way out.

    The union shop was written off as a has-been enclave of old, white dinosaurs -- an ossified, shrinking base of the Democratic Party.

    The media glitterati were no longer to be mocked as empty suits and pompadour fools, but rather treated as useful foot soldiers in the revolution.

    So what happened to turn the party of Harry Truman, JFK and even Bill Clinton into a woke neo-Maoist movement?

    Globalization created a new multibillion-dollar consumer market for American media, universities, law firms, insurance groups, investment houses, sports leagues and entertainment outlets, not to mention the internet and social media.

    In contrast, work with hands was passe, the supposed stuff of deplorables and clingers -- and so better outsourced and offshored.

    Traditional Democrats were seen increasingly as namby-pamby naifs who rotated power with establishment Republicans. Now with money and institutions in its hip pocket, and cool popular culture on its side, the left would not just damn American institutions but infect them -- alter their DNA and reengineer them into revolutionary agencies.

    So here we are with a near one-party system of a weaponized fused media, popular culture and the administrative state -- confident that all Americans will soon agree to love Big Sibling.

    Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Case for Trump. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.



     
  8. MojoMan

    MojoMan Member

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  9. pirc1

    pirc1 Contributing Member

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    Democrats is a party full of warts, then there is Trump and GOP. The END for now.
     
    FranchiseBlade likes this.
  10. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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  11. Space Ghost

    Space Ghost Contributing Member

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    People still follow politics?
     
  12. FranchiseBlade

    FranchiseBlade Contributing Member
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    Are the Democrats still in favor of vaccinations and responsibly tackling the pandemic?

    Are Democrats still in favor of counting the votes?

    Are Democrats still in favor of holding those accountable took part and encouraged the insurrection attempt to stop the certification of free and fair election?

    Until these issues don't all fall in favor of the Democrats they are still in a far far better state than the other party.
     
  13. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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    "Why Top Democrats Are Listening to Eric Adams Right Now":

    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/26/nyregion/eric-adams-mayor-democrats.html

    excerpt:

    When Eric Adams won New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, his supporters in Congress were bombarded with questions about him from colleagues representing districts in Michigan and Florida, Chicago and Los Angeles.

    When a national group of Irish American Democrats gathered in Manhattan recently to toast President Biden’s victory, Mr. Adams was there too, touting his admiration for Irish American former co-workers in the Police Department.

    And in the span of a week, Mr. Adams met with Mr. Biden at the White House and with the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, on Capitol Hill. He appeared with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to discuss combating gun violence. And he stood with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand outside Brooklyn Borough Hall, endorsing her proposal for federal gun trafficking legislation.

    Mr. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, has been his party’s mayoral nominee for less than three weeks. But already, many national Democrats appear eager to elevate the former New York police captain, as gun violence shatters parts of major American cities and Republicans seek to caricature their opponents as naïve about crime.

    Mr. Adams, for his part, is seizing the mayoral bully pulpit, moving to cement a national reputation as a Democrat who speaks with uncommon authority about both public safety and police reform.

    “Every year, you have these different playbooks,” said Donna Brazile, a former acting chair of the Democratic National Committee who recently encountered Mr. Adams on the set of ABC’s “This Week.”

    “He has the commanding playbook for the moment,” she said.

    In some ways, it is a difficult playbook to replicate. Mr. Adams, who will be New York’s second Black mayor if he wins in November, as expected, grew up in poverty and says he was beaten by police officers before joining the force himself.

    He spent years drawing attention for challenging police misconduct, only to emerge as the most public safety-minded candidate in this year’s mayoral primary. His striking trajectory and promises to combat inequality helped him connect with a broad swath of Black and Latino voters and with some white working-class New Yorkers. And the buzz around him now is due in part to interest in the likely next mayor of the nation’s largest city.

    But some party officials and lawmakers also say that Mr. Adams offers a template for how to discuss matters of crime and justice, urgent issues for Democratic candidates across the country as the early contours of the 2022 midterm campaigns take shape.

    “He’s a unique messenger carrying a message that we should all be carrying,” said Representative Thomas Suozzi, Democrat of New York.

    Whether party leaders are ultimately comfortable with Mr. Adams as a national standard-bearer will hinge on how he governs, should he win, following a primary campaign in which he faced significant scrutiny over issues of transparency and ethics tied to tax and real estate disclosures, his fund-raising practices and even issues of residency.

    But for now, many Democrats seem ready to promote Mr. Adams, whose primary win has fueled fresh intraparty debates about which kinds of candidates best represent the base of the Democratic Party. And the good relations Mr. Adams is working on building with Democratic leaders could yield help from Washington — where the city already has powerful representation — as New York emerges from the pandemic.

    Some argue that Mr. Adams’s victory is a potent reminder that many Black and Latino voters object to the most far-reaching efforts to curtail the power of the police, even as those same voters revile police misconduct.

    Mr. Adams insists that those views are not inherently in conflict, and he has not shied away from bluntly challenging left-wing Democrats on the subject.

    Last fall, a conference call of House Democrats devolved into an emotional brawl over key issues, including whether the “defund the police” movement had damaged their candidates — a subject that remains deeply divisive within the party in New York and nationally.

    David Axelrod, the veteran political strategist, said Democrats who believe that “the policing issue was a negative in 2020 for Democratic candidates” appear especially interested in Mr. Adams’s pitch.

    “Whether they’re in love with him or not, they seem to be in love with his message,” he said. “Adams gives you a way to talk about crime and civil and human rights in the same sentence.”
    more at the link
     
  14. Andre0087

    Andre0087 Member

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    Do you ever think about taking a break? All I see are threads from you...
     
  15. Jugdish

    Jugdish Member

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    [​IMG]
     
    Andre0087 likes this.
  16. Andre0087

    Andre0087 Member

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    He must be sitting pretty on some PPP money or the generous unemployment benefits. You know how those moderates are...:rolleyes:
     
  17. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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    if you don't like how people participate on clutchfans, you could always go start your own clutchfans
     
  18. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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    related

    "In times of stress, turning to contemplation can be helpful – here’s why religions emphasize rest":

    https://theconversation.com/in-time...ful-heres-why-religions-emphasize-rest-162970

    In times of stress, turning to contemplation can be helpful – here’s why religions emphasize rest
    July 23, 2021 8.13am EDT
    Kristen Lucken
    Lecturer in Religious Studies, Brandeis University

    Over a year of dealing with COVID-19 has left a lasting imprint on our daily lives. The pandemic disrupted usual work routines, with the majority of Americans having to work from home for long spells. While working from home has some hidden benefits, such as no daily commute, it also resulted in longer workdays and high levels of stress for many.

    A global study of the communication patterns of 1.3 million workers during the global lockdown showed the average workday increased by 8.2% during the pandemic, and the average number of virtual meetings per person expanded by almost 13%. Many in the workforce felt overloaded with never-ending online meetings and unexpected family obligations that added pressure to the lives of working parents and other caregivers.

    People’s well-being can be profoundly impacted if work-life balance ignores the need for rest and recuperation. As a scholar who studies the sociology of religion, I know that the themes of rest and contemplation are woven throughout the fabric of most religious traditions, and they remain equally salient in our lives today.

    Faith, contemplation and rest
    [​IMG]
    Themes of rest and contemplation are woven through many religious traditions. Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images
    The Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam view a day of rest each week as a sacred right and responsibility of believers. The traditional Jewish Shabbat offers a 24-hour period beginning at sundown on Friday when the busyness of everyday life halts. Participants gather to worship, share a meal, study and pray.

    Similarly, practicing Muslims celebrate their holy day on Fridays. This is a time when Muslims step away from work to attend a midday jumah, a prayer service at a local mosque, where imams offer sermons on a range of intellectual, spiritual and practical topics and lead congregations in prayer.

    Although attendance numbers are declining, many Christians observe the holy Sabbath on Sundays through church attendance, communal worship, music and the sharing of the Eucharist, when Christians consecrate and consume bread and wine representing the body and blood of Jesus Christ. The Christian Sabbath represents a time to rest, pray, worship and spend time with family.

    Branches of Islam, Christianity and Judaism additionally call for regular times of prayer and contemplation as part of daily and yearly cycles. In the Islamic tradition, stopping to pray throughout the day represents one of Islam’s five pillars of faith.

    Through the practice of meditation, religious traditions quiet the senses in order to achieve a mindset of rest that they believe brings about heightened consciousness. Hindus, Buddhists and Jains teach the concept of dhyana, which generally translates to “contemplation.”

    Through yoga, meditation and other contemplative practices, practitioners can achieve a state of meditative consciousness and self-awareness that can lead to better mental, physical and spiritual health.

    Quieting the mind
    Religions emphasize the need for rest and quiet reflection so our over-cluttered minds can focus on prayer and other contemplative practices. The Apostle Paul discusses how cultivating the “fruit of the spirit” through prayer and contemplation moves us toward patience and away from egocentrism.

    Buddhists believe that quieting the mind through meditation can help people recognize that their feelings, perceptions, worldviews and even the self are impermanent features of life that can cause suffering. It can also help people contemplate their connectedness to the world around them.

    Rest and contemplation help connect religious people with the deeper sources of meaning they seek to cultivate through scriptural study, meditation and prayer. As the American Trappist monk Thomas Merton explains in his 1948 autobiographical book “The Seven Story Mountain,” contemplation is a time of rest, the suspension of activity and a “withdrawal into the mysterious interior solitude in which the soul is absorbed in the immense and fruitful silence of God.”

    Health benefits of rest and meditation
    Medical science has become religion’s unexpected partner in confirming the benefits generated by these religious practices.

    Researchers have found an association between downtime, learning and creativity. Sleep, nature walks and exercise offer a number of life-enhancing benefits, including improved memory, productivity and physical health. Recent advances in neuroimaging technologies have allowed researchers to observe brain changes during times of intense prayer, yoga and mindfulness meditation. Scientific evidence suggests that engaging in these practices may lead to improved health and well-being.

    A broad range of clinical studies on mindfulness, decentering and acceptance therapies note that regular meditation can physically alter the brain and how it responds to the world. For instance, these practices have been found to transform the brain’s neural pathways and create new neurological networks that can lead to improved health and well-being.

    Research on the practices of Japanese and Chinese Buddhist monks reveals benefits for physical and mental health. Furthermore, active meditations, such as yoga, qigong and tai-chi, are found to increase a sense of well-being through the regulation of mood and the reduction in anxiety and depression.

    Even in the midst of a pandemic – or a stressful work week – taking time to rest, exercise, sleep, meditate or pray can lead to improvements in our everyday physical, mental and spiritual health.

    [Get the best of The Conversation, every weekend. Sign up for our weekly newsletter.]


     
  19. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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    back to the original topic

    ‘People are scared’: Democrats lose ground on school equity plans
    Moderate and suburban voters share concerns about education changes and say national Democrats dismiss their arguments.

    https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/26/democrats-school-critical-race-theory-500729

    excerpt:

    Kaplan, who has launched an email list, set up meetings with state legislators and recruited people to meet with their school boards to discuss ethnic studies, is representative of Democrat-leaning or politically moderate suburbanites interviewed by POLITICO in six states, all but one of which were won by Biden. They are up in arms over their school systems’ new equity initiatives, which they argue are costly and divisive, encouraging students to group themselves by race and take pro-activist stances. Proponents of the initiatives say they are a long-overdue step toward getting rid of systemic racism in the school system.

    On the national level, Democrats have insisted that the brush fires over critical race theory — which has become a political punching bag even for unrelated equity initiatives — are largely the work of right-wing activists who willfully misrepresent what it means, and they blame Fox News for fanning parents’ anger.

    "That's another right-wing conspiracy. This is totally made up by Donald Trump and [Republican candidate for governor] Glenn Youngkin," Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe said in June.

    “I don’t think we would think that educating the youth and next and future leaders of the country on systemic racism is indoctrination,” said White House press secretary Jen Psaki in May.

    But those Democrats appear to be underestimating parents’ anger in places where critical race theory is top of mind. Objections to new equity plans are not the sole province of conservatives but extend to many moderate and independent voters, according to POLITICO interviews with school board members, political operatives and activists in Democratic and left-leaning communities including the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C.; Palm Beach County, Fla.; New York’s Westchester County; Maricopa County covering Phoenix, Ariz.; and suburban Detroit.
    more at the link

    @Andre0087
     
  20. Andre0087

    Andre0087 Member

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    Spoken like a true 99er...oh wait.
     

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