Yes I am paying attention. Your moving the goal post from gutting to dubious choices in allocating revenue. No way, no how this amounts to gutting social programs.

Tell you what, pick you pick a social program in a state where money allocation has changed to the detriment of the poor and we can discuss how it might be allocated more effectively. That might actually result in a reasonable discussion. Poverty rates haven't changed that much. Too many people are disenfranchised unfairly IE they have too little hope is a given.

I didn't have any goal posts to begin with. I never talked about programs being gutted. I think I few have but in other cases it's about purposefully making the block grant program inefficient in order to shift money from the program to other state programs. The amount of money stays the same to the program but the effectiveness is diminished. It's not a matter of honest differences in approaches, it's an intentional method of setting up hurdles in requirements and complexity in order to seize that money for other needs such as lowering tax rates and consequently score rhetorical points about reducing welfare etc.

Justice Democrats is positioning itself as a tea-party movement for the left. The stated goal is to 'primary' corporatist dems in blue districts.

I think it's a great idea.

"A tea-party movement for the left" isn't a great sales pitch

Why not? The TEA party movement just got Trump into the White House.

Most informed political observers think that Trump will be a very bad president though.

in history a broad popular front always does better as a base of resistance than a narrow united front imo.

Paid disinformant?

Who funds this and what's compensation like? And is 2p2 politics really trafficked enough for this to be possible?

Can you elaborate? Off hand I can think of things like the civil rights or labor movement which were far from having 'broad, popular' support.

it's was a bit glib, sorry. and this is mostly from memory, so take it with a grain of salt.

one of the big issues in interwar europe was about whether the hard left/communists should pursue a broad 'popular front' against fascism or a more ideological coherent, but smaller, united front.

in germany the strategy was a pure group of communists without social democrats. one of the ideas was that after the nazis the communist would get their turn ('After Hitler, our turn' was a slogan). it was maybe one of the things that undermined the weimar republic, and when they realised it didnt work it was too late.

in france and spain otoh popular fronts, including social democrats and others, won elections against the hard right (the latter would still end up losing the civil war, partly because of infighting among themselves though).

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...an-troll-house

I'm personally pretty confident we have had paid posters on this site.

Sometimes winning isn't everything. One of the things the Tea Party did was displace undesirable (but a least qualified) Republicans with some truly mouth-breathing imbeciles under the guise of a grass-roots movement that was nothing more than a massive push by very powerful backers. Not only did they change that entire party for the worse they were decidedly non-productive.

The Dems don't need another competing movement. If there are quality folks that want to challenge an incumbent and join the club, that's great. But I don't think the Democrats are a lost cause to the point they need to focus on another movement unseating more moderate and experienced Dems in primaries when they're already general election dogs vs. Repub crazies right now.

My social circle is (relatively) strong with these harder-line progressive types--that's what this Justice Democrats thing is now that I've had a chance to look into it, Cenk (Young Turks guy) is behind it--and to me seems like a lot of them...their echo chamber is as bad as any alt-righter. Not all of course, but many have this whole edgy/elitist "true progressive" thing they wear and probably don't realize how isolated they actually are in the big scene.

And it's not that like they have terrible ideals or goals (mostly). But they do have a very unrealistic view of how to actually accomplish them. First the far left just doesn't have the base that the far right does. They have Christian conservatives, energy folks, NRA, gullible older folks and so on WHO BY THE WAY ACTUALLY VOTE.

This group is talking for example trying to unseat Cory Booker. There are things I could pick at with him--his campaign funding from Wall Street is Republican-esque for one and that's been well-covered here in NJ press--but on the whole he's unquestionably become a great asset and rising star. Why the hell would a liberal start by trying to unseat? First of all he's in office until 2020. Second of all you have tons of (D) Senate seats at risk in 2018 or you know, maybe take a run at Nevada or replacing someone who retires. Or take some Congressional seats.

No, it's just simpler to burn it all down rather than try to strengthen the party. Obviously the answer is to recruit laypeople who happen to fit their so-called platform, which btw is awfully specific...it reads like a list of someone's personal political vision. Oppose death penalty, NAFTA, TPP, stop & frisk, raise min wage, pardon Snowden, chain capital gains to income tax, up the estate tax and so forth. JFC why not just run for a seat yourself.

This is largely correct. Lefties everywhere should definitely read more Gramsci about the importance of cultural hegemony and building a historic bloc.

They are trying to elect people that will actually support popular economic policy like addressing student loan debt, minimum wage, UHC, financial reform, etc.

The argument is that someone like Corey Booker is progressive on social issues that have no impact on his donors, but is smoke and mirrors on economic policy.

Franco won because Germany and Italy supported him to a much larger degree than the Soviets supported the opposition and the euro liberal democracies kept their hands off because they didn't want to encourage rebellion in their own colonies and wanted to keep the peace with Hitler.

Besides, they didn't dislike Franco that much anyway and were big friends with him after WWII.

The Soviets for their part actively sewed disunity among the Republicans/Communists/Anarchists and opposed revolutionary groups for reasons I'm not entirely clear on, but perhaps because they were trying to preserve a relationship with France at the time.

Not that a lack of unity didn't hurt in the Spanish Civil War, but I think outside powers really sealed the fate in Franco's favor.

It's a very long shot, but not unheard of. If someone wanted to disrupt a largely left-leaning forum by sowing dissent, they'd post a lot like HastenDan does, don't you think?

Obviously like 99% he's some embittered exile doing it for shigs.

it doesnt really matter at this point. in a few years it will be illegal to be a democrat.

certainly they will stand no chance of winning as more states follow the lead of nc and virginia. and ofc when millions of voters are disenfranchised and possibly arrested after this new investigation.

There's definitely precedent.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/p...reer/94088186/

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/members/26806/

Though Rich is a pretty stand up guy.

Yeah man, Air America is still a dominant talk radio station for the left, too!

Russian IP addresses?

I am personally pretty confident as well.

On one hand, there have almost certainly been paid Russian trolls on this board. On the other hand, there are plenty of American dip****s out there who are genuinely enthralled with Putin's strongman bull****. Mastery of idiomatic English is the closest thing we have to a Turing test for distinguishing between the two.

Tulsi Gubbard makes Hillary Clinton look like Eugene Debs

What kind of odds could I get on Kamala Harris winning the Presidency in 2020