It's been a summer.
Maybe if, like 2014, it had been the summer of the Twinkee it would have been a fun summer?
Did you like Twinkees?
My sweet taste has changed since I was a kid.
Some of the stuff I loved then was sickeningly sweet. But I also liked Lemon Heads, Red Hots, etc. These days? It's really just chocolate if I'm going to have something sweet.
Do you remember rock candy? I loved that. Trying to think what else I loved. Oh, Whatchmacallit -- did I get that right? That candy bar and the Zero candy bar, I loved those.
But, again, today, if it's not chocolate, I'm not going to eat it.
There was a Susan Blakely TV movie when I was in school -- maybe 5th grade, maybe 6th. And my three best friends and I watched it. We made plans to. Susan was hooked on drugs. So we watched the movie and the next day we pretended we were hooked on pills but used Red Hots. We did that for like a week. I think that's the last time I ever had Red Hots.
Okay, Senator Bernie Sanders spoke with Joe Rogan for Joe's podcast. Stream it. Bernie's a real candidate.
"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):
Wednesday, August 7, 2019. Mike Gravel ends his campaign and endorses
Bernie Sanders while, for too many others, the vanity campaigns roll on.
The nonsense never ends as the race fot the Democratic Party's presidential nomination takes place. You've got the hysterical Neera Tanden clutching the pearls over Barack Obama (Republicans glorified Ronald Reagan! -- who the f**k cares? Are we supposed to be Republicans? We never glorified Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter.)
The nonsense never ends as the race fot the Democratic Party's presidential nomination takes place. You've got the hysterical Neera Tanden clutching the pearls over Barack Obama (Republicans glorified Ronald Reagan! -- who the f**k cares? Are we supposed to be Republicans? We never glorified Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter.)
About Face: Veterans Against the War Retweeted
I'm sure your fam wasn't harmed by the Obama deportation machine. Mine was. Some of the fams of the ppl who were protesting Biden were. Stupid is running on a pro-immigrant platform, having an entire Democratic gov, not passing any legislation & instead deporting millions of us.
You've got so many weighing in when they know nothing.
For example, some are offended that Joe Biden is being forced to answer for the 1994 crime bill. Bob Somerby's one of those. He's whined about it here and here, for example. Bob Somerby whimpers that others voted for it too! Why are people so mean to Joe Biden when other people voted for it too!!!!
He sounds like the YOUTUBE crazy asking people to leave Britney Spears alone, doesn't he?
Stop the fake news, people. Joe Biden's responsible for the 1994 crime bill and, if you don't believe me, why not believe Joe Biden himself?
July 24, 2007, candidate Joe Biden in "Fourth Democratic Debate" (transcript is THE NEW YORK TIMES' transcript):
And I do have -- I do have a record of significant accomplishment. The crime bill, which became known as the Clinton crime bill, was written by Joe Biden, the Biden crime bill. That required me to cross over, get everyone together, not -- no one's civil liberties were in any way jeopardized. We put 100,000 cops on the street. Violent crime came down. The Violence Against Women Act, what we did in Bosnia, and so on. So I have a track record of being able to cross over and get things done.
"The crime bill, which became known as the Clinton crime bill, was written by Joe Biden, the Biden crime bill." That's Joe speaking publicly in 2007.
Yeah, he deserves to be held accountable for the bill. And he was happy to brag about it as late as 2007.
Joe Biden Must Face a Reckoning For His Role in Building Mass Incarceration
"Biden was not just the primary author of the 1994 Crime Bill, he was the primary author of most so-called crime bills from the 1970s until 2008." @shaunking
thenorthstar.com/articles/joe-b…
Joe Biden just said prisoners should be given access to resources when they step out of jail, like Pell grants, but Biden's 1994 crime bill literally took away Pell grants from felons.
...if you author a crime bill that devastated an entire generation of young black men; if you fight instituting tools to help integrate schools; if you continue to put your hands and lips all over young women uninvited, you should reconsider your career path...
#Blackwomen shouldn’t support @JoeBiden’s candidacy! The Crime Bill resulted in the mass incarceration of #Blackmen! This policy has generational consequences for the #BlackFamily! #BlackTwitter ProjectSeparation.com #8States #BlackExodus #IndependenceMatters @BernieSanders
There is one less candidate running for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.
Today we’ll be ending the Gravel 2020 campaign, as we have been planning from the start. It was an incredible honor to work for Mike, one of the greatest men of our time—someone of boundless courage and incredible tenacity.
Of course, this was not a “campaign” in the strict sense: we never wanted to win, and always made that clear. The campaign wasn’t about Mike as much as it was in his honor—it was a crowdsourced and intimately democratic project, about ideas rather than individuals.
We did a lot of good. We aired anti-Biden ads in Iowa and nationwide, and created and pushed the most detailed, radical platform of any candidate. We’ll be donating the funds, which we expect to come to $100,000, to Flint and a few other charities once we’re done with merch.
And the list of 67,000 active donors we compiled will be invaluable in helping Democrats like @MeetMckayla and @JDScholten—we hope to use it to aid progressive candidates as they wrest power from the establishment.
But the most enduring legacy of any campaign—think McGovern ‘72 or Sanders ’16—is its influence on young people. And we reached them: one Iowa Gravis poll showed us with 5.9 percent support (ahead of Harris and Warren) among people aged 18 to 29. That's a success.
A campaign for an 89-year-old, managed by teenagers, got several times more donations than five congressmen, two governors, a senator, and the mayor of America’s most populous city. And we frequently outpolled them, too! I mean—we qualified for the Democratic debates!
Mike isn’t perfect. We often differ with him. But he has that great virtue—rare among our political class—of being human. There is no artifice. As Rorty said: “If we look to people who make no mistakes, who were always on the right side...we shall have few heroes and heroines.”
This campaign, really, is about crafting a new society—a kind and gentle society, based on dignity and equality, solidarity and love. A good life for all, regardless of inborn traits or one’s station at birth. A world of peace and real freedom, democracy and fraternity.
We sought to make explicit themes whispered by larger campaigns—a revolt against the soullessness of contemporary politics, a forthright egalitarian populism reminiscent of Bryan, Long, and Yarborough, a desire to restore fun and camaraderie to politics.
We do not enjoy politics; it is an ignoble craft, and we have more respect for those who entered it out of a resigned sense of duty than those who think they have the mandate of heaven. We did this for Mike, a great man dishonored in his time, and for the principles we hold.
Irony and humor are important because they're tools to skewer the powerful, and we use them because they attract support. (It worked!) But beware of irony lapsed into fatalism. Be a happy warrior, be joyful—but be earnest. If you give into cynicism, you become useless.
Our favorite quote of Mike’s is from 2008, when he was asked about prayer: “What I believe in is love. And love implements courage.” Our politics, and Mike’s, is based in love, in the duty “to do justly and to love mercy.” As Dorothy Day said: “The final word is love.” That’s it.
So with that, the Gravel 2020 campaign is over. We want to thank our wonderful staff and supporters. We’re going on vacation and won’t be tweeting for a while. Henry is abroad right now; David will be traveling around New England. You can follow us at @humford and @davideoks.
This account will transition into the account for the Gravel Institute. Of course, the character of the account will thus change. (We’re not sure we’ll be running it!) Details for that will come later, after August.
We’ll eventually follow up with an article about what the Gravel campaign accomplished, and we’ll be thanking a few of our supporters individually over the next few weeks. Thank you all for what you accomplished. We are eternally grateful.
Mike Gravel has endorsed Bernie Sanders.
"I am proud and honored to endorse Senator Bernie Sanders for the presidency of the United States."
Mike Gravel Retweeted
This is why @MikeGravel's Bernie Sanders endorsement means so much.
Here's Gravel breaking down while reading the 4,100 page Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record. He read past 1 AM. No other senators were left in the room. He wanted to make sure every word was recorded.
It is time for others to follow Mike's lead. As we argued here on Sunday in "Talking entry" and at THIRD in "Editorial: Bye Tulsi" and "Joe Biden is not the answer," it's time for the vanity campaigns to close shop. Not only are you not going anywhere, you are keeping real candidates -- like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders -- from getting the time on the debate stage and in the media that they need to make important arguments.
Tulsi's campaign is going nowhere. Gabbard should focus her efforts on re-election before that's completely off the table. Her sole reason for being on the debate stage was to call out endless wars and those who brought us the endless wars. She refused to do that last week in the debate and then, much worse, spent the following days minimizing War Hawk Joe Biden's actions and lying about him saying he was 'sorry.' She achieves nothing on the stage of value. Her vanity -- even her vanity -- should have vanished long ago as she saw no support.
Unfortunately you refused to go after your friend @JoeBiden on his disastrous Iraq vote and his warmongering leading up to the Iraq war. He was one of the main cheerleaders of the Iraq war! You blew a golden opportunity tonight to call him out on his warmongering!
I am against the forever wars -- and I can call out Joe Biden -- but Tulsi never had a chance. People don't like her. More to the point, college students didn't like her. As I repeatedly noted in the last months, there were few Tulsi supporters on campuses. We went all over the country except Alaska (we've even been to Puerto Rico this year speaking) and Tulsi has no base. People don't like her.
Maybe she was too pretty to garner support? It could be and if that helps her vanity and helps her move along to something else, Tulsi, you're too pretty. They couldn't take you seriously because you were so pretty.
People did not take to her. She got a spot on the stage at the June debate and at the July debate and neither appearance bumped her support levels. But college students never liked her and that's really a warning sign because (a) her age should have made it much easier for her to communicate with them (she's only 38) and (b) the issue of the forever wars (and the hypocrisy that surrounds them) are issues that matter to college students. But over and over, we have encountered campus anti-war activists who supported Bernie or Elizabeth. A few have supported Beto. A few are supporting Adam Kokesh -- who has gotten no corporate media coverage. The day after the last debate, was there any network that didn't have Tulsi on? And still the polls show no movement for her.
The vanity campaigns need to end. That doesn't mean Tulsi will drop out. We can't force her to. You'd think her inability to get above 1% all of these months would have forced her to but apparently her vanity prevents both self-examination and embarrassment. But if she cared about any cause that she pretends to, she'd be following Mike Gravel's lead and announcing she was closing her campaign and endorsing someone.
She'd probably endorse Joe Biden because that's how useless she is. But she needs to end her vanity campaign.
.@JoeBiden opposes war to his core that he voted for the Iraq War and even presented an award to a war criminal for endless war. #DemDebate2
About Face: Veterans Against the WarNew content at THIRD:
- Truest statement of the week
- Truest statement of the week II
- A note to our readers
- Editorial: Bye Tulsi
- TV: Swindling the audience
- Joe Biden is not the answer
- Tweet of the week statistics
- 10 Great Songs by the Pointer Sisters
- Tweet of the week
- This edition's playlist
- Meet Dario Hunter
- Senator Murray, Local Leaders Applaud Federal Hous...
- Some Tweets from the Green Party
- Stepping Out of Line – Dropping A Banner At FERC
- Tulsi Gabbard The Betrayer
- Highlights
The following sites updated:
