That ship has sailed. Obama gave up in Syria. I had hoped Hillary would reverse course if possible.

The solution that these people would be expected to learn something before deciding your future would be an abomination.

SA may appreciate being told to **** off straight up rather than getting alot of nice sounding rhetoric but no action. It seriously may be better to let everyone know we are not getting involved unless it directly and clearly affects US interests, period, so that they don't misassess their situation.

Most of them, even the middle and upper middle class citizens, wouldn't be able to. Brain drain is a real thing here. All the smart kids GTFO after high school.

This is absolutely false. We guarantee Saudi Arabia's protection. If they dump the US dollar I think we'd have some Ron Paul "are you ready for the coming economic collapse?" equity.

No.

Ok I will expand a little. Saudi has been dumping the dollar (reducing their reserves) dramatically do to the low price of oil.

The petrodollar scheme is one of the reasons we can run our crazy deficits.

How do you think democrats should try to solve this problem? Because I've been thinking about that a bunch lately and I have no idea.

What do you mean no action? We just made the biggest arms sale in the history of the world to them. We have 5 military bases in SA with thousands of American service members and contractors. We serviced their fighters and bombers and refueled them mid-air when they were dropping the cluster bombs we sold them on Yemen. We almost always have at least one Air Craft Carrier Group in the area. Carrier Strike Group 10 is based in Khalifa Bin Salman Port in Bahrain, 30 miles from SA right now.

(100 mi to Iran. We own the Persian Gulf, SA and Iran just live there.)

They can learn, but they quickly forget. They were told that Obama was a Kenyan Muslim Socialist, but they realized it was bull**** and voted for him anyway. It's not what you teach them, it's how you teach it.

Just ask yourself what MLK would do. Or Obama if he could run again. Therein lies the answer

Specifically, I meant keep saying Assad must go and the red line. I assume there are other places in the Saudis-Iranian proxy wars were the Saudis expected more help from us, but may be wrong.

They need to stop being corporate wall street shills, which is very hard to do it seems. They need to run a true populist campaign like Bernie and Trump did, and actually deliver it when they get elected, unlike Obama.

Electing the wall street shill, Chuck Shumer as senate leader is exactly what they should not have done. They are in serious trouble imo and a lost cause.

Obama is most to blame for all of this imo. 8 years ago he and the democrats won power in a landslide, and he did his job so poorly that his successor is Trump. Says it all really.

Funny Goldman Sachs just announced they are going to start creating loans for people to pay their bills. Trump definitely has Wall Street right where he wants them.

Picking Trump over Clinton because she is a Wall Street shill is one of the top three or four dumbest excuses given. Clinton gave speeches, trump owes billions to big banks all over the world. It's absurd that anyone would frame him as being the better choice if Wall Street banks were their concern. Of course like so much in the election common sense and logic didn't even enter into the thinking. I suspect the average person who loled Wall Street for the election couldn't name more than 1 Wall Street bank nor could they give even a basic description of what they do and how they do it, and thus should be reined in.

This doesn't mean there are not issues with big banks, it just means like so many other things people just ignorantly regurgitated keywords to defend their choice.

I challenge ANYONE to come and explain to me how and what Donald Trump is going to do to "Wall Street Banks" that made him a superior choice. Just push all his other baggage aside. You literally could not pick someone who did not actually work for a big bank that was beholden via business and relationships more than Trump is. I feel like I am just being punked over and over.

So you equate Hillary's support and prime funding from Banks, to Trump using Banks? That's definitely some silly framing. The average person does not need to know the details of Wall Street operations to know that there is a severe conflict of interest when a candidate gets millions from them. They are not stupid and you shouldn't treat them as such.

Nobody is sure what Trump will do to Wall street but the fact is he was not paid millions for speeches from them and did not receive hundreds of millions of funding from them, so right there that is a distinct difference and advantage over Clinton on that front.

Trump might be totally full of crap and do nothing but its still a chance of change, even if its 1% compared to 100%business as usual with Hillary.

Its so ironic that the Republicans stole the populist theme from the democrats.

I'm not sure if the Dems need a populist, that may work with the Republicans, but I think Dems are a little more sophisticated. Hillary with all her faults beat
Sanders, it wasn't close. Colorado rejected single payer health care like 80-20. Not even in Sander's state Vermont, single payer could happen.
Young people may love a populist who offers them free ponies, they may go to rallies, but actually voting is not as exciting, so they don't care to show and vote.

I'm not sure this happened because we didn't move enough to the left, and I'm really not sure, that's the answer for 2020.

The fact that Sanders, 75 years old, acts like your slightly wacky uncle, almost unknown nationally, self titled socialist, deliberately under mined by his own party, and the media, gave Hillary a competitive fight in the primaries, should be evidence enough of how strongly his messaged resonated.

Obama got elected with the same message in 2008 as well don't forget. Take away Trumps extreme immigration positions and he often sounded like a progressive. You said the Democrats don't fall for that message, but democratic strong holds in blue wall all fell for Trump which is is what allowed him to win.

I think its quite clear what the people want, the problem is neither party has delivered it them hence them having to RESORT to Trump. Make no mistake, many of his voters did not like him and gritted their teeth as its the best option they had.

This is a really good post

Vermont did pass single payer. It was hugely popular. Governor Shumlin almost lost reelection because he was failing to get it implemented as promised. The people of VT didn't kill single payer, the insurance companies and interstate businesses did.

The bold is why Newsom will win in 2024 or 2028.

Newsom could be a good candidate but he also radiates an aura of coastal elite liberal, def not a shoe-in.

imo Gavin is a cheesy skymall salesman who gives off worse douchechills than Martin Shkreli; his policies are not the problem his problem is that he's muggle Gilderoy Lockheart and a grinning incarnation of what repulses people about politicians. The dude is not going to be president. And while I think we know much too much about people's personal lives his scandal was ****ing gross and imo goes to character.

Both Hillary and Bernie talked about this stuff at length during their campaigns. People just don't remember because the media wanted to talk about EMAILS and then there's whatever idiotic thing Trump said on twitter last night

Hillary could have said a lot more and been more specific about jobs. How much of her time do you think was spent on it? 10%? Do you know how much she planned to spend on infrastructure? How she would impact small business? What should would have done for unions?

What if all that stuff was 30-50% of her content?

And, another thing that gets overlooked, manufacturing jobs have increased since the recession and one of the big problems as far as job losses in the rust belt has been the auto industry moving to the Southern United States where there labor is mostly non-union. That's where we're building cars for pretty much every European and Japanese car company.

however much time she spent was more than Trump's jobs bigly believe me crooked hillary schtick

I mean we're talking about using reason and specifics to appeal to a voting bloc that just got done responding overwhelmingly favorably to non-specific bluster

Right, but it's not necessarily about turning Trump voters into Hillary voters. There's also just getting people to vote.