Wait until someone pretends to still not know what a Wall st bro is in a bad faith attempt to obscure their existence.

Will Smith said once that racism isn't getting worse it's getting filmed.

Society is still adjusting to the age of social media and the hyperproliferation of information, both good and bad. We are learning about ourselves and our incredibly egocentric and narcissistic ways.

Life, in general, is better now than it ever has been before, and hopefully will continue to be so all the way up to our extinction. We are currently being shocked by having all the ****ed up **** that still goes on in the world despite said upward trajectory on almost all metrics put in our face 24/7/365. It's remarkably depressing since negative experiences greatly outweigh positive experiences pound for pound...That is, if you have empathy.

Out of sight out of mind is no more. Ignorance was never bliss. It's actually lethal at times, and punishes you ubiquitously until you are no longer ignorant. Stay focused, stay positive, optimize everything at all times.

/truthbomb

John Lewis and Other Black Leaders Spurn Black Challenger in Boston https://nyti.ms/2Iyd9LH

10-term white D congressman in a safe, majority non-white district is getting a primary challenge from a black woman and the CBC rushed to endorse the incumbent. Ugh.

Is the white guy bad? They call him a "liberal democrat" in the piece (as opposed to someone like Dan Lipinski, who NYT would call a conservative Democrat). If he's good, then why does it matter?

Here's a view on that from the article:

Look at it this way, ATC: if a bunch of Democratic party insiders are rushing to endorse the incumbent who's been around for 20 years, is it really likely he's all that great?

I don't really find that pastor's point compelling. It sounds like he's conceding that the white guy "has voted within [their] interests," which I take to mean has voted for the community's priorities, but nonetheless, they need a black person in the seat because it's about time for that.

I find your point about the establishment not being likely to endorse someone who doesn't suck much more compelling, but I like John Lewis, and if Capuana is someone he likes to work with, and the community doesn't have any real objections to his voting record (maybe they do, but that's not what was in the article), then I don't see what the big deal is.

In general, I don't have a problem with the Dem establishment defending an incumbent against a primary challenge. I have a problem when they defend a terrible incumbent like DiFi. In a case where the challenger and the incumbent hold similar views and the incumbent is not hated among the grassroots, then I can see a few reasons why they would reasonably prefer the incumbent and express that preference to the voters.

Fair, but for this part:

What if the two are inseparable? The D party endorsing incumbents isn't an example of them saying "hey, lay off this guy, he's good", it's an example of them doing what they always do: protecting insiders. Look at the laundry list of elected officials that have endorsed DiFi, it's sickening. This culture of protecting incumbents needs to be burned to the ground before we can ever take seriously someone saying "hey, lay off this guy, he's good".

Incumbents will always get the support of the party establishment unless they’ve done something terrible, because incumbents are more likely to get re-elected. Dems want to grow their numbers in Congress, and that’s easier if they have as many incumbents as possible running. You’re asking the party to go against its own interests, which won’t happen.

A worry about the general election applies to neither the CA Senate race nor the MA congressional election in that article

I know the white congressman in question very well (holidays together, etc). Don't want to disclose our exact relationship.

I think Ayanna Pressley is pretty awesome, but she and Capuano are both very far left on the spectrum of congressional Ds and I don't think there is any issue where she is further to the left than he is. He is not your typical corrupt D, he's one of the good guys.

I sympathize completely with how absurd and awful the D-apparatus is when they step in on this type of thing. With that said, on the issues, unless you convince me otherwise, the two candidates here are basically the same, it's not a spot where Pressley is the progressive and Capuano is the centrist.

And with that said, I completely understand why, if all other things are equivalent, you'd choose the fresh blood black woman over the established white man. I would too.

Those are my two cents, carry on.

John Lewis stepping in to endorse a long-term incumbent is one of the few cases I could imagine just shrugging and blindly voting DemE in a primary.

I figured Capuano would be pretty high up in the leadership, and pretty far left on the ideology score, but it turns out he's not.

Here's Capuano's score:

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/mem...capuano/400063

Here's my 2nd-term Rep's score:

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/mem...e_clark/412600

My Rep is #12 on the leadership chart after less than 5 years. Cap has been there for 19-20 years, and is below the median Democrat on leadership. I'm kind of shocked by this, but I didn't look at the formula they use for leadership. Maybe it's just the number of bills they co-sponsor or something like that.

In any case, the Rep from Capuano's district should be in the top 10 most liberal Democrats, not in the middle of the pack.

The methodology for both leadership and idealogy for that website is very much about co-sponsorship of bills.

https://www.govtrack.us/about/analysis#ideology

This Tezlyn Figaro lady fromthe article below seems like a real life Bernie bro. Works for a Sanders aligned political organization when she’s not a guest on Fox News praising Trump and talking about immigrants commiting crimes and taking away benefits from real Americans.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/...ts-2018-599331

A lot of lefties are bashing this article but it's legitimately troubling that OR is following the OFA playbook and completely squandering an immensely valuable resource right at the cusp of the midterms.

Endorsing Kucinich was EMBARRASSING. Cordray isn't even centrist, man, and Kucinich has completely lost it in the last 5 or so years. Sanders personally has been on the ball and generally only made good endorsement choices but OR going for cranks waters down and might even make their endorsement toxic, no big picture thinking at all.

Turner seems like she has grifting tendencies and that she topped out at state senator(running unopposed as appointed replacement incumbent) is a big red flag. Minority whip of the state senate is generally a path to bigger and better things, but all she's done since then is lose a state cabinet race and appear on cable news.

It's also hard to say for sure, but I think a lot of Bernie's appeal wasn't just his policy positions but his authenticity and his history of consistency on key issues. People trust him, they believe him, and they view him as the type of change candidate that doesn't kowtow to either party's establishment.

But that's not something anyone is going to see right off the bat with these lesser-known candidates. So his endorsement and his organization's endorsement is likely going to be less fruitful in fundraising and driving people to the ballot box. Plus, a lot of people just think that the POTUS runs everything and the way we fix America is getting a guy like Bernie elected and then magically he'll pass a $15/hr minimum wage and undo Citizens United - when in reality, even if he won the presidency he'd have to find a way to harness that grassroots support and turn it into phone calls, letters, e-mails and primary votes in order to pressure people to vote for his proposals.

That article is bad tho. Our Revolution is doing terribly... by winning 40-50% of the elections involving people they endorsed. Our Revolution's failures reflect poorly on Sanders's organizational and leadership abilities... even though Sanders is "legally separated" from the organization and "does not keep up with [its] day to day activities." Our Revolution really dropped the ball, missing out on the Dem party's big victories... by not endorsing Connor Lamb, Doug "I Mike Pompeo" Jones, and Ralph ****ing "Incentivize People to Have Really Great Healthcare" Northam. The article is largely concern trolling from a standard Politco establishment fetishist.

I think it’s more that the problem is almost intractable problem. Good luck getting younger, poorer, less politically knowledgeable voters excited about midterm primaries. Add in incompetence and grifting tendancies amongst the leadership and it’s hardly surprising they haven’t had much success.

By what metric have they "not had much success"? According to the very hit piece linked, OR has a 40-50% win record. The Tea Party was portrayed in the political press as this great movement, an amazing grassroots swing in the Republican party. What was their win record?

http://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytim...ts.html?src=tp

35%.

Regardless of all of this, as Fly said, the Nina Turner stuff is not a good look.

"not a good look" is not a good look. Pick some faction of some party and I'll find what elements of it are "not a good look" and then compare them to Nina Turner. Self-criticism is great, but no political group is perfect and right here in this thread right now a couple of you generally not like this posters are basically nodding along with David Brooks, Larry Summers, Bari Weiss, and Bill Kristol and agreeing that Nina Turner is a grifter and Denis Kucinich is a wingnut.

Lol.... win percentage? The tea party has a major voting block in the house, forced the resignation of the Speaker, primaried the majority leader etc etc etc. Any progressive group would be thrilled to have half the impact of the tea party. It’s not even really fair to compare the 2 yet.

So what is OR's lack of success that you spoke about in the previous post? They started on Aug 24, 2016 according to Wiki. Clearly the best organization in the world that started at that date would not have a voting block in Congress. The only metric of success at this point that I can think of is win record, where they're doing fine.

By the way, you mentioned forcing the resignation of the speaker. Well Paul Ryan just resigned because he knew he would probably lose to OR-endorsed candidate Randy Bryce.

Try reading the article? Poor fund raising, progressive candidates winning without ORs endorsement, insiders admitting there are problems.

lol. Progressive candidates winning without OR endorsement is not a failure of OR. Maybe instead of evaluating them on the performance record of candidates they did not endorse, it might make more sense to evaluate them on the ones they did, i.e. they're ****ing win record.

Insiders admitting there are problems - wow you really got em there. The left is known for lack of internal conflict, so insiders admitting there are problems is hudge.