brooklynite
brooklynite's JournalPence Will Control All Coronavirus Messaging From Health Officials
Source: New York Times
President Trump announced Wednesday evening that Mr. Pence would coordinate the government’s response to the public health threat even as he played down the immediate danger from the virus that is spreading rapidly across the globe. Mr. Pence was scheduled to lead a meeting of the government’s coronavirus task force on Thursday.
Officials insist the goal is not to control the content of what subject-matter experts and other officials are saying, but to make sure their efforts are being coordinated, after days of confusion with various administration officials showing up on television.
Mr. Pence said Thursday that he had selected Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the director of the United States effort to combat H.I.V. and AIDS, to serve as the Coronavirus Response Coordinator for the White House, enlisting an experienced scientist and physician to manage the response to the potential spread of the virus.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/us/politics/us-coronavirus-pence.html
Why does the truth need to be vetted?
The Nordic Social Democratic Republics have been around for 50+ years...
If I search, will I find videos by Sanders in the 70s and 80s trumpeting the accomplishments of them and their leaders?
Sanders adviser floats $300 billion plan to give jobs to all Americans
The HillStephanie Kelton, who has served as a senior economic adviser to Sanders since his 2016 presidential campaign, told reporters on the sidelines of a National Association for Business Economics meeting that such a program made sense as a first step, Reuters reported.
“I like very much the idea of getting a safeguard in place right away because, like most people, I worry about what happens when the next downturn comes,” she said.
Such a program, Kelton said, would allow Sanders to tackle federal student debt, which would increase economic growth, after which trillions could be allocated to pay for programs such as "Medicare for All" and the Green New Deal.
Iran's vice president has contracted coronavirus, state media says
Source: The Hill
Masoumeh Ebtekar, Iran’s Vice President for Women and Family Affairs, has contracted the coronavirus, CBS reported Thursday, citing Iranian state media.
Ebtekar, who served as an English-language spokesperson for Iran during the 1979 hostage crisis after Iranian protesters seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran, is reportedly exhibiting only mild symptoms and has not been hospitalized. Ebtekar is the fourth Iranian senior official to contract it.
The nation has seen one of the highest number of coronavirus cases both in the Middle East and in any country outside China, with 254 confirmed cases nationwide and at least 26 deaths. Earlier this week, Tehran announced Iraj Harirchi, the top Iranian official responsible for dealing with the virus, had also contracted it.
The majority of Iranian cases are concentrated in the city of Qom, a holy city south of Tehran, but last week health ministry official Minou Mohrez said “It’s possible that it exists in all cities in Iran.”
Read more: https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/484943-irans-vice-president-has-contracted-coronavirus-state-media-says
Buttigieg plots risky delegate strategy to survive Super Tuesday
PoliticoButtigieg’s campaign said in a memo that its objective on March 3 is to “minimize” Sanders’ margins and maximize “delegate accumulation by [congressional] district, not states.” Anticipating a drawn-out primary process, Buttigieg is looking to survive deeper into the calendar, making it to mid-March contests in the Midwest that might provide more opportunities for him.
Buttigieg is focusing on selected districts in smaller media markets throughout the country to rack up delegates, from Austin, Texas and its suburbs to San Diego, northern Maine, and other locales where Democrats flipped House seats in 2018. But it’s a risky strategy to maintain momentum, and that risk is born out of necessity.
Buttigieg doesn’t have the money to compete more broadly across the 14 Super Tuesday states, like Bernie Sanders and especially Mike Bloomberg, nor is he expected to set up Super Tuesday by finishing strongly on Saturday in South Carolina, where he’s struggled to gain any traction among voters of color. He’s not wading into more favorable demographic territory, like Joe Biden in the other Southern states coming up. And he’s not getting the benefit of home-state primaries on March 3 like Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren.
But a candidate can still “run up the score with district-level delegates, especially when there are still so many candidates up and kicking,” said Ace Smith, a California-based Democratic strategist who works for Kamala Harris. Smith noted that the strategy has sustained successful presidential campaigns in the past: “It’s the Dukakis strategy,” he said, referencing the 1988 Democratic primary.
Cops repeatedly called on Bernie backers
Politicohttps://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/26/cops-called-bernie-backers-protest-117782
UVA Center for Politics: The Sanders Tax
The Vermont senator’s campaign of course argues that he would expand the Democratic electorate, as Sanders’ pollster told the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent. Meanwhile, there are reasons to think that the Sanders path is built on a goal, expanding youth participation, that has historically been very difficult to achieve, as David Broockman and Joshua Kalla argued in Vox. Additionally, Sanders does not seem to have as much appeal to white voters with a four-year college degree as some other Democrats.
In our view, we think a Sanders nomination would tilt the election more toward Trump, to the point where the ratings would reflect him as something of a favorite. However, we would not put Trump over 270 electoral votes in our ratings, at least not initially and based on the information we have now.
But these ratings changes would force Democrats to sweep the two Toss-ups, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and also hang onto the Leans Democratic states, specifically Michigan, that if Sanders proves to be weak will be very much in play.
Here’s what we’re thinking we would do. Map 2 shows hypothetical revised ratings. To be clear, these are not changes we are making to our ratings now, but if Sanders seems to grab ahold of the nomination in the coming weeks, we likely will make most if not all of them.
http://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/the-sanders-tax/
So far, I've read all the following Sanders arguments here:
I would suggest that, when you're going through this much effort, you're losing the argument.
NYT: The Case for Amy Klobuchar
Take one stark pattern: In the 2018 midterms, many Democratic candidates who ran persuasion campaigns flipped areas that had gone for President Trump in 2016. Not a single Democrat won a competitive state or House district with an unabashedly progressive campaign.
Yet the presidential field is dominated by candidates who haven’t had to worry about persuading swing voters in years, if ever. Delaware (Joe Biden’s home), Massachusetts (Elizabeth Warren’s) and Vermont (Bernie Sanders’s) all voted against Trump by large margins. Pete Buttigieg and Mike Bloomberg were each the mayor of an overwhelmingly Democratic city.
The best case for Amy Klobuchar is that she’s the only remaining candidate with a track record of winning over the kind of voters that the Democrats will need to beat Trump. She has built her career on a middle-class image that avoids the leftism of Sanders or Warren and the elitism of Buttigieg or Bloomberg. As for Biden, Klobuchar looks sharper than he does — and she has a much more impressive electoral history.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/opinion/amy-klobuchar-2020.html
NYT: The Case for Joe Biden
To nominate Joe Biden is to pass up that opportunity.
The Democratic Party has a choice: to root itself anew in working-class politics, trying to weld together the interests of younger Americans with downscale and service-sector voters, or to lean into its emerging identity as an upper-middle-class coalition, a party of progressivism and technocratic competence.
To nominate Joe Biden is to duck that choice.
This combination — plus, let’s be frank, Biden’s fumbling, wavering, I’m-too-old-for-this persona — explains why it’s so hard to find passionate supporters of the former vice president among pundits and commentators, real-world activists and Twitter agitators. To choose Biden over the more interesting options, over Bernie Sanders and Mike Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg, is to choose the past over the future, sustainable decadence over dynamism and drama, the same old ineffective establishment over a more decisive break.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/opinion/joe-biden-2020.html
Profile Information
Name: Chris BastianGender: Male
Hometown: Brooklyn, NY
Home country: USA
Member since: 2002
Number of posts: 94,503
