Note how they would have gotten both candidates wrong.
My rule of thumb is that whoever is leading at this phase of the run is not going to be the candidate. It always seems nailbiting at the time but it's been right for all the years I've been paying serious attention to the campaign, which is about since 2004 or so. (I recall paying attention to both Clinton campaigns but not the primary fight; I was in high school for them. I don't quite recall the 2000 primary fight well enough to remember if Bush was always the primary frontrunner; my memory says no but I've learned not to trust it, and I can't name names as to who was.) Someone older than me may be able to recall a counter example.
So, yes, I'd say Bernie Sanders is definitely in it. But I won't repeat the errors of the general punditariat and make wild proclamations about how much he's in it. It's still not out of the question another Democratic contender that's little more than rumor right now could pop up and dominate with surprising swiftness... IIRC that's a fair description of how Obama got to the Presidency.
The problem with Bernie is that he has very limited appeal outside of the areas where he's campaigning (overwhelmingly white, also a lot of college towns). He has a chance if he can improve his standing among minority voters somehow, but even then it's a long shot.
That's why you're seeing them do so well with their own respective bases. While it is undeniable that the general public doesn't care about corporate bribery within politics, it is clear that enough people do to seriously bump the limited candidates that fight against it up in the polls.
Do I think either can win? I think, in theory, both could win their respective primary. But I also think that if either did win their respective primary then their "message" would be considered too extreme by the moderates which have the biggest swing vote in American elections, Republicans always vote Republican, Democrats always vote Democrat, it is the moderates that are the kingmakers.
So ultimately what I think will happen is that both will continue gaining in popularity, but when it comes right down to it, someone more "electable" will win the primary since neither party can afford to actually lose the presidency completely. That means maybe Hillary and Marco Rubio.
Focusing on the latter, fivethirtyeight did a comparison of Clinton's chances today compared to 8 years ago and found that she is in a much better position [1]. As much as I want Sanders to win, I trust fivethiryeight and I think they've got it right on this one.
[1] - http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/bernie-sanders-youre-no-b...
Up until a few weeks ago there were too many Republican candidates to keep track, no perceived competition for Clinton, plus Clinton was not talking to the media.
Trump is a front runner because there are too many Republicans so none of them stand out. Democrats have been sitting out the primaries because they don't want to be punished by Clinton and the rest of the establishment.
Trump and Sanders make for interesting stories, and they will live on that for some time.
If you're in the 1% sure that makes sense, but for everyone else life is so much nicer with free healthcare, good vacation time, maternity leave, good public transport, proper prisoner rehabilitation, and strong welfare safety nets.
Having a high GDP country is cool and all but wouldn't you want a much nicer life instead?
From my perspective, there's no one answer, but I've noticed a handful of things:
* Race - Most democratic socialist countries tend to have more homogeneous populations. The U.S. has sizable African-American and Latino-American minorities, often segregated into their own neighborhoods, and that often informs how the white majority votes -- i.e. things like welfare and prison reform are viewed as handouts to people not like themselves. You might say it's comparable to how perceptions of Greek laziness inform German attitudes towards debt cancellation.
* Geography - The U.S.'s political system grants a disproportionate power to sparsely populated states (e.g. a state like Wyoming has more electoral votes per person than California, and states like Iowa and New Hampshire have a large say in how the presidential primaries turn out). This matters with respect to policies that might be considered urban-centric -- e.g. public transportation.
* Militarism - The U.S. is the only country that regularly projects force halfway around the globe, and it's super expensive. Every dollar spent on bombs is a dollar not spent on healthcare. It's a good question as to why American voters constantly favor military might, but it's not necessarily an irrational choice. Or rather, you could argue that it wasn't an irrational choice during WW2 and the Cold War, but that the development of a military-industrial complex has had lasting effects on American politics.
Also remember you are seeing a media/attention filter on everything. Nobody reports or passes on the mundane things. Instead controversies have to be found that outrage some people, all the better to get eyeballs on the TV/site and go viral on Facebook.
I do recommend following Scott Adams' blog (creator of Dilbert). He has an mba, is a trained hypnotist, and various other skills unrelated to comics. He has been writing about the various techniques Donald Trump is using, and why they are so successful. (Note not endorsing Trump, but rather observing.) http://blog.dilbert.com/
Essentially you have to pay, and be a "share-holder" in everything. You should be on top of things everywhere, etc. etc.
And someone recently posted this on his fb page: "If a businessman makes a mistake, he suffers the consequences. If a bureaucrat makes a mistake, you suffer the consequences." - Ayn Rand.
In essence the above is correct, but it does not tell the whole picture. While the businessman most likely would suffer, nothing is being said about lots of innocent people that would suffer too (and being on Hacker News, the recent story of security breaches leaking lots of personal information).
Also it's not always the case that people would suffer the consequences due to a bureaucrat (assuming public office of sorts), and even if they do, it'll be less painful (distributed over all the population of the country, state or city), rather than people directly being affected by certain business.
To my friends, it's really painful that they have to pay taxes - some of them don't have kids, and they don't think they should pay for school. I fuckin don't get this, since not having good education is the road to ruin...
Here are some choice requirements put on the schools: (6) provide an assurance that not later than 5 years after the date of enactment of this Act, not less than 75 percent of instruction at public institutions of higher education in the State is provided by 10 tenured or tenure-track faculty;
(B) Increasing the number and percentage of full-time instructional faculty.
(C) Providing all faculty with professional supports to help students succeed, such as pro- 9 fessional development opportunities, office 10 space, and shared governance in the institution.
(D) Compensating part-time faculty for work done outside of the classroom relating to instruction, such as holding office hours.
(E) Strengthening and ensuring all students have access to student support services such as academic advising, counseling, and tutoring.
On top of that it actually states states must:
ensure that public institutions of higher education in the State maintain per-pupil expenditures on instruction at levels that meet or exceed the expenditures for the previous fiscal year;
Even if the 70 billion dollars in taxes comes, how are states supposed to support all of this 10+ years down the line? There are absolutely no cose saving measures in his plan. It is all just utopian fluff.
Source (worth the read): http://www.sanders.senate.gov/download/collegeforall/?inline...
In the implementation stage they must've had similar problems to the ones you're describing. Is it a hockey-stick graph and are these obstacles just necessary for future prosperity?
Here's the thing: we generally seem to work on the assumption that paying for college is an investment sufficiently worthwhile that people should be willing to consider borrowing money, against their future income potential, to pay for it. Right now, we expect individuals to take on that debt themselves, personally.
That has pretty terrible consequences for the individuals for whom the investment doesn't pay off.
But if, in general it's a good bet that paying to get someone educated will increase the value of their aggregate lifetime economic output, why shouldn't the state be putting some money towards it? The government could borrow money at bond rates and use that to pay for a whole bunch of people to get degrees, and assume that the overall future increase in GDP (and consequent tax take) will be enough to pay back the additional borrowing. An the bonus? Even if there are some people who don't realize the potential economic advantage of their education, on aggregate the bet wins (if you frame it right and make sure the funding went to real degrees with real value, of course).
This is the problem with most rhetoric around government debt. Not all government spending is a write-off - some of it (infrastructure spending, spending on education, R&D funding, international development funding) is an investment in future potential. If an investment is worth making, it's even more worthwhile making it with borrowed money. If the government is borrowing money to pay for medical care for seniors, maybe we have a problem. But to fund educating 20 year olds? That seems likely to be something that could pay off.
This is what you get when people think with their emotions instead of logic. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Anyways, I've been asking people who like him to really explain because I don't get it and often just see 'he speaks truth, you are an idiot if you don't get it'. Um okay.
His platform - though overly ambitious - contains a bullet list of the exact things I believe are in desperate need of fixing in the nation. For the sake of brevity I'll stick with only 3:
> Rebuild Infrastructure
> Reverse Climate Change
> Health Care as a Right for All
I honestly don't understand how every candidate isn't running with at least the first of that list on their platform. Our infrastructure is barely viable at this point and has been limiting our growth since the start of the software revolution. This is a bigger problem on more local levels but those get their initiatives from the fed and thus it's a place to start.
Reversing climate change (or at least reducing the effect of it) is another I can't believe that every candidate isn't running with. The longer we wait to address the problem with meaningful change the worse of a future we guarantee. The worst outcome of heading down this path is that we were wrong about some specific technology delivering us from the perils at hand - but then (like a broken unit test) we know that won't work and can incorporate that knowledge into further endeavors.
Then there's healthcare. The ACA was an excellent stepping stone - but it has to be that. Something to get us through so we can pull ourselves to the next step. The fact that so many Americans are soon to be required to have another insurance fee is ridiculous. This is the exact type of service that is the reason we pay taxes. I understand that some people view taxes as some illegal manifestation of government power - I just disagree with that entire sentiment. The proper role of taxes seems to be to cover the costs of burdens that we all collectively share. Every person in this nation needs healthcare to some degree. The health insurance market has already shown us that we can create a way to account for varying costs among individuals. That pattern falls into the existing pattern of our tax code pretty easily. Remove the middle man profiting off of our shared burden, replace it with the state, and reduce our burden slightly.
So there's a nutshell of why I like Sanders. His platform appeals to me. It's not some notion of 'starving people and millionaires' - it's that he wants to change the country in a way that I think is 'better'. Like Obama - if he gets only a small amount of his ambition accomplished he will still have created a better place.
We should not have starving people. But there is over 20% child poverty in the US.
The only reason we have this, the only excuse for it, is the same market ethos that justifies intense wealth. When we challenge intense wealth, we eliminate poverty. And when we eliminate poverty, every social ill that depends upon it diminishes radically.
This challenge to intense wealth, called leftism, doesn't get rid of millionaires, nor systems of personal property, nor personal liberty. This gets rid of a system of worship of intense wealth and puts an end to accepting the premise that accumulating wealth far beyond what any person or family can actually use is a justifiable thing.
His general election numbers are a lot worse than Hilary for the time being. Hillary has the advantage over every GOP candidate in the polls (Bush and Rubio are close) whereas Sanders only has the advantage over Trump (wouldn't that be a hilarious election?). A significant part of that is name recognition, but it's hard to say how much.
The conventional political wisdom is that he has little chance, but of course the conventional thought is only right most of the time, not all the time.
Be careful when people try to compare 2016 to Obama in 2008. Right now Hillary has double the support she did at this time in 2007. She never once broke 50% in the polls during the entire 2008 primary. She's been riding at a steady 60-65% so far this primary up until this month. With that said, Obama didn't surge ahead of her until February of 2008 so we have a long way to go.
The problem is that Sanders has a message that resonates with a lot of disaffected white male progressives. If you dig deeper, you can see he's not really great on issues of race or gender. Sanders has some momentum, but I think Clinton has a marginally better message on race and gender.
From where I sit, there's still room for a real progressive to show up - someone who can talk about the economic reforms Sanders is pushing, and also sit down for real with the #blacklivesmatter activists about police reform. Someone who could pull both off could beat both Clinton and Sanders to the democratic nomination, maybe. Still time yet, but I'm not holding my breath.
All that said, Clinton possesses a ton of resources for fighting for the primaries in all the important states, and it's hard to ignore that unless her favorables slip underwater, even if a really exciting candidate does throw their hat into the ring.
When you concentrate all power into a small point it makes manipulating that power much easier for the elites. No longer do they have to bribe politicians in each state, just the ones in Washington DC. The founding fathers knew this (they experienced this with the British Monarchy) and that's why they intended on having a very limited federal government that had little control over social programs and whose main purpose was to see that states take it upon themselves to enforce rights provided by the constitution.
Remember when we integrated schools? The left would like you to believe the DOE is some kind of federal schooling system when in fact all it really does is issue pell grants. The federal government did not take over the schooling sector. The only thing the federal government did was step in when a state refused to integrate.
I urge leftists to reconsider their position. I'm in favor of social programs like single payer healthcare, but having the federal government do it is just asinine. The federal government needs to pass a bill that makes healthcare a right, then leave it up to the states to implement free healthcare. Those that don't will be forced to, just like we did when some schools refused to integrate.
If you hate too big to fail companies, then why allow one entity to monopolize a whole sector of the economy? As soon as one of these huge social programs fails, down goes the whole economy. It happened in the USSR and it could happen here. Just let the states handle it like they do in the EU. That way, when one states social programs fail it doesn't bring down the whole economy. Notice that this is a compromise. The left still gets it's healthcare while the right still gets a small federal government. It's a win-win. Unfortunately both the left and right would like you to believe that any compromise is giving into the other side, they must perpetuate the idea that you only have one right choice and that if you're not with them you're completely against them.
Bernie's biggest problem is the tax code. I don't see any plan to reform it or make it simpler, big businesses are already evading taxes through tax loopholes because it's so easy to manipulate our centralized tax code. Even if he raises taxes on billionaires he has no way to prevent tax loopholes without complete tax reform.
It wouldn't be fair to compare the US to socialized countries like individual European nations because most European nations aren't world powers policing the globe and have much more economic and political stability. Most socialized European nations aren't experiencing social unrest or widespread disagreement about social policies.
The US on the other hand has much more disagreement. The USSR consisted of many countries dominated by the Soviets who didn't agree with many policies of the government. While the US isn't taking over other countries and making more US states, the states are already similar to small countries.
As we concentrate power more and more at a federal level we take away sovereignty from the individual states. This, in my opinion is very similar to what lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union. They spread themselves thin and forced everyone to assimilate under one political ideology. This only works when a large portion of the country agrees with said policies.
While the US will probably never suffer the same fate as the USSR, I could easily see us spreading our selves too thin across the globe, mismanaging money, and pissing everyone off, thus leading to economic decline and loss of faith in the political system as a whole (this is already happening).
America won't be able to handle monolithic socialism. We want too many things.
Hardly. The Articles of Confederation only lasted some 12 years and was very quickly superseded by the Constitution which granted a much stronger federal government with executive and taxing powers. Nor were the Founding Fathers in any harmonious agreement in the slightest. Since the beginning, there had been persistent debates from the federalist side (like Alexander Hamilton) and the anti-federalist side (like Thomas Jefferson), the debate still going on to this day.
As much as you and I may dislike it, Hamilton won.
There are actually a lot of similarities between Sanders and Paul: they made the splash they made for the same reason (they're honest politicians who put their values before the party line), and they'll crash and burn for the same reason (no support from party elites, most "supporters" are just people who share Facebook posts and don't vote).
Perhaps.
> and he has no chance of winning the general election even if he were nominated.
The national head-to-head polls I've seen that have included have him beating all the Republicans he is polled against (Trump, Bush, Walker, and Rubio), in some cases by wider margins than Clinton does in the same polls. That's not to say he would win the general if nominated, but I'd certainly expect more than mere assertion from someone who wanted me to accept their argument that he certainly would not do so.
Well, that depends who he is up against. Imagine Sanders vs. Cruz with Trump as a 3rd party candidate...
Why do you say that? I could perhaps be convinced, but at this point I don't see any reason to think that.
https://spfaust.wordpress.com/2011/06/12/socialism-vs-social...
https://www.barackobama.com/45325r/ has a "thanks, Obama" GIF meme.
https://www.bobbyjindal.com/dfka blames the 404 on Obama with #ThanksObama" too.
404 pages are an opportunity to hide an easter egg but I wonder what presidential 404 page got The Atlantic focused on this trend in the first place.
(Edit: or Sanders's, indeed. That's what I'd usually write.)
It gets tricky to keep straight when you have plural nouns that don't end in S. I know "Men's clothes" is correct. But I'm not sure what to do with fish. "The fish's pond"? "The fishes' pond"?
(In any case, just because a word ends in S does not mean it needs an apostrophe. Many, many English writers need this lessen pounded into their head. I lose brain cells every time I see someone write "want's".)
That's a pond belonging to a single fish ("The fish's pond") versus one belonging to multiple fish ("The fishes' pond"). You're completely right!
We can agree that the title is clearly wrong :D (In case it gets fixed, the title was submitted with: Sander's)
Reasonable people disagree: http://www.dailywritingtips.com/possessive-of-proper-names-e... but those are the only two correct versions.
But as with all things, informal writing was more popular than formal writing, and eventually the s' style grew in such popularity that it became valid and understood in its own right.
So now effectively we have two "correct" ways of representing the same thing, a "long form" version and a "short form" version. The way I was always taught it (in a stuffy English secondary school) was that consistency within a single text is the most important thing, if you write s's once, you have to use it everywhere else also (ex. quotes).
Corrected:
Hi, this is senator Bernie Sanders. The good news is you're on the right website - and it's a really good website - the bad news is you're at the wrong page. Just scoot down to the bottom of the page and you'll find your way back home to where you should be. Thanks very much for being a part of our campaign.
Wouldn't it be nice if everyone instead of voting for a certain candidate, voted on the issues, and the candidate who voted most like the population would win... and their votes would be made public.
Then I took the quiz, intentionally answering the opposite of everything I actually believe. Still about 80% for Bernie Sanders.
I'm at a loss.
Thus my 404 page is a honeypot, and too many 404 accesses in a short period results in an automatic IP ban.
If someone is trying to get to admin.php, sure, ban them. Or if they are not following robots.txt. But sitemaps are not reliable enough sometimes and not all crawlers are meanies.
Include a directory "visiting-this-will-ban-you" in your robots.txt that IP bans whomever visits it.
Heck when MSFT redesigned technet/MSDN half of the links were dead allot of the Google results for legacy products will still lead you to a 404 page on technet...
55 upvotes and 4 comments
weird..
EDIT: 5 new upvotes in less than a minute
I don't know how much of a chance he has to win the presidency, but I can say that I like him much, much better than any other candidate (and I'm not a political kind of guy).
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/feeling-the-bern...
I think that might be what relegates him to second place. The people who like him might go out and vote during the primary but that's it. You need to attract a lot more than votes or bodies at rallies to win the primary. You need to attract supporters willing to volunteer and get out on their streets all over the country.
