...and an illegal war of aggression against a nation that was never any threat to the U.S.

Deciding on equal rights?

...but of course you knew that.

over a million human beings died, men, women and children.

I remember Souter, he was a Republican appointee.

We have Republicans here in NY State who voted for Gay Marriage.

We had Dems who wouldn't have done so just a few years ago.

But over one million dead human beings, torture maiming for life, suicides, see our troops record on that.

Priorities, what should I care most about!

You did just dismiss that massive crime, I will never forget it or those who made it possible. I still remember the dead bodies of little children, every day almost, posted by Dahr Jamail.

Wish I could just worry about ME and who gets on the SC, but then I think of them and worry that it could happen again.

And then, there's her record as Secretary of State. Along with CIA Director Petraeus, Hillary pushed the regime change operations in Libya and Syria that predictably turned into a massive civil war between Shi'ia and Sunnis across the region. That's a very Right Wing neocon record that somehow doesn't get factored into this, but should.

Plus she's done and said plenty to be concerned about as SOS, e.g. Syria, Libya, Iran, Haiti, etc.

Which republican do you prefer to see in the WH if your action prevents the Democrat?

Hillary is a hawk who has expressed hubris and recklessness regarding Iran, Libya, Syria, Haiti, etc. Domestically she helped author the TPP, ordered a tainted environmental impact report on Keystone, and commisurated with Wall Street.

She is in no conceivable way a liberal. And she will not get my vote. I've had enough of the Third Way assclowns masquerading as Democrats.

I'm not choosing between a giant douche and a turd sandwich (ht/South Park).

Run.Elizabeth. Run.

But I don't have a problem with someone to the left of Hillary challenging her. I think it would be good, in fact, so long as we unite behind the nominee.

if only to see the naysayers' heads explode. LOL.

I am convinced she's at least mulling it over. Hope springs eternal.

if she does run after all these denials, she'll need a good "why I got in" story. I think it would hurt her credibility. But I do adore her, so I hope we see more of her soon. Personally, I love to see her as VEEP.

Where did that come from? What did it mean?

using the same logic, same terms, and almost identical postings.

If you're going to make an accusation about something, do it. I'm a big boy. Do me the courtesy of being up front with your slander.

I support Hillary for President.... at least for now. We have a primary season coming up and I'll listen to any other candidates, but right now, she's my candidate.

Just in case you were not aware.

Um, yeah, I think ANY Democrat - and heck, any Republican - can do as well as she did last time.

What we do say is that she's the best candidate we can run, with a wide breadth of domestic and foreign policy experience, and polling over time has shown her with a lead over every likely Republican.

Prove me wrong. Show me how Bernie Sanders wins a national election where the voting blocs are more middle of the road than they are in Vermont. Show me how Lincoln Chafee raised the $500 M it will take to run against the Republicans.

Just ribbing you on the irony of your remark. Cheers.

Your opinion seems to be that that the Democratic party is all shit. Full of losers, failures, and garbage. It's the only way to explain why you're so certain none of htem can win no matter what.

So far, I haven't heard of any possible candidates who I think could really win the generals, but that's what primaries are for. Some of the anti-Clinton vitriol here has crossed the line into the absurd.

... in 2008, I thought Obama was the man to face the R's and I supported him. Now I think it's Hillary. She has experience, I think she has a strong presence, and though I don't agree with her on several issues, I think she's a decent mainstream liberal.

I love Bernie Sanders, and in my dream world, he'd win the Presidency, but I just don't see a rumpled dude with a heavy Brooklyn accent winning the generals. Like it or not, "looking Presidential" matters at that level. O'Malley will be cast as a "typical east-coast liberal" and Warren isn't running. Just my assessment so far.

And that's for democrats to not vote.

As 2010 and 2014 show, even some democrats are swayed by bullshit mainstream memes, and many are just downright apathetic. At least for the moment, we have to deal with the reality of electoral politics, not the theoretical. This is one reason why we struggle so much on the state level. A lot of Democratic voters don;t even pay attention to state politics and the GOP engineered super-majorities in the state houses of states that shouldn't have super-majorities, going by the demographics. They are using those majorities to gerrymander the fuck out of their states to concentrate democratic votes in as few districts as possible. They'll keep doing that as long as they can, to maintain a minority rule over this country. Demographics are on out side, so they will attempt to screw with voting rights as much as they can to blunt democratic clout at the polls and delay their downfall as long as they can, or perhaps even maintain indefinitely.

The ONLY bullwark to that is a Democratic President and the judges and justices they can appoint to prevent these perversions of the Constitution.

So while I agree that if all democrats got out and voted, this would be a shoe-in, the reality is they WON'T all get out, and we need the candidate who has the best chance to winning against the GOP candidate. In my view, that's Hillary.

But I don't expect everyone to agree with me, so by all means, advance a Candidate, and let's have the primaries. Then let's do our best to to get the nominee elected, even if they were not our first choice. I don't, for example, think O'Malley would be the best nominee. But if he were nominated, I would donate to him and work my ass off to get him elected.

If a system is failing, it needs to be evaluated, not dismissed, don't you think?

here's an example of why Democrats offer low turnout in midterms.

it's only been a day and a half since she announced..chill LOL

and no because he's on cleanup of a clusterfuck that started with the authorization to use force against Iraq in retaliation for 9/11 when they had nothing to do with it.

I think the president should have shut down our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan during his first term. I am not a fan of much of his foreign policy, with the exception of Cuba and Iran which are huge. If he is successful in sorting those out and all things considered, he'll have earned the Nobel in my view.

The reality of doing such things is way more complicated than the idealized version of it running through your head.

running through my head would have been immediate withdrawal

... while we needed (and need) to engineer as much as a withdrawal as possible, we do have a "you break it, you bought it" responsibility there, IMO. I am sympathetic to your sentiments, but I guess I am more rooted in Real Politik.

info that wont matter to you since your agenda is clear.

Last edited Tue Apr 14, 2015, 02:24 PM - Edit history (2)

link: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/02/18/upshot/hillary-clinton-and-the-2016-democrats-mostly-liberal-together.html?abt=0002&abg=1&_r=0&referrer=

Or in the top 10% if you count all 100 which includes the frothing at the mouth conservatives.

Bummer stat.

Being in the Senate makes a record of actions.

I am not a Warrenista. And Sanders is still a capitalist lap dog.

Not joking.

... in this report. There's a lot of propaganda trying to make corporatists to look more liberal with these "ratings", when the basis for their ratings of how much they "voted with the party" as I think they note here how they ranked Schumer #1 here really isn't a relevant measure in my book on how "liberal" they are.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/pictures-video/the-15-most-liberal-senators-20140206

So if you voted "no" on a Wall Street reform bill because it wasn't tough enough, your "conservative" score went up and your "liberal" score went down.

Also, it's limited by the bills that actually got to the floor. "Crazy" ideas like expanding Social Security are not scored at all.

You make a good point about the difficulties of assessing a particular vote as liberal or conservative, but after some link-clicking I didn't even find the list of votes.

One plausible explanation that emerged from what I did read is that it was a measure of the coherence of each party caucus, i.e., that Clinton was the eleventh-most-loyal Democrat -- which makes it even more worthless than you suggest.

Purity or death!

route from the real, hard, you know IMPORTANT issues of economics/Wall Street/whatever issues affect straight, white people could give less than a damn about her liberal bona fides. Surely you realize this by now. These folks have burned a million calories creating a narrative and they will be damned before they let any truth or facts affect this.

And I'm still on the damn fence about Hillary! I would love nothing more than for the Democrats here to just ignore these folks. These same folks have been screaming the same BULLSHIT about President Obama for the last eight years and have just changed 'Obama' to 'Clinton.' The problem is, they make so DAMN much noise here to compensate for the fact that they have nothing even resembling clout in the real world, that they are impossible to ignore.

What matters is where she will be over the next 10 years or so.

Let me be your champion is what I heard in a roll out ad. The thing is she hasn't been a champion of the people where it matters most to the people and that is in big banking and Wall St. That's where I can't choose to support her.

I believe that she will at best be good on domestic issues, tastefully hawkish to keep the MIC content. Her credentials as to the world of diplomacy are serious shit to consider. I doubt she would fight against the banksters for we the people half as hard as say Bernie or O'Malley. I'd actually like to see O'Malley on any ticket as VP, but I digress.

Hmmm, Sanders/O'Malley That's one that could happen.

I'm just curious, when did screwing the average guy with Bankruptcy reform, invading Iraq, and the PATRIOT ACT become liberal policy?

If they are liberal policy, and voting for them makes you liberal, what party do I have to join to oppose abominations like that?

That's a pretty low bar. If that's all we can get right now, it is what it is. I don't have to pretend to like it, though.

Again, it is one thing to be like me and support Bernie, but when the time comes and Bernie isnt running and Hillary is and the alternative is a republican, it is UNTHINKABLE to not vote for her.

Hell, I am a democratic socialist, Bernie is my idea of a liberal, and I could criticize her all day long if I wanted to.

no point

about a social liberal, not a rightwing minority and gay hating asshole.

Nobody is perfect including Hillary, especially her friendliness with wall street, but they all seem to have some of that, or most

You could start by giving me a link to the actual list of votes that was used to calculate who's liberal. I couldn't find it.

It's just more meaningless numbers based on the original methodology -- GIGO.

See my detailed explanation in #75 in this thread.

Which votes were considered as liberal and which were considered as conservative? The excerpt from the Kos post that I quoted suggests that the answer is "None", which if correct completely undercuts any claim that the work supports the conclusion cited in the OP.

The daily business of the Senate is too fucking far to the right for anyone to be touting liberal credentials based on it.

An exception would be the sponsoring and shepherding of truly liberal bills of the sort that never see the light of day.

We need representatives far more liberal than most of Congress.

BUt given a choice between the mildly liberal Hillary or the racist, gay hating, environment hating, human hating rightwinger


well, I hope I dont have to finish that comment

...to paint our nominee as a champion of liberal values. It would tend to confuse our search for actual liberal candidates.

You are not bullshit, but PR slogans are. I'm down with nominating a candidate from the deep end of the pool, so to speak, but there are many other and deeper bodies of water.

if she is the nominee, and looks that way at this point, then there is only one thing a responsible, informed, mature adult can do.

We have seen what the teaparty is willing to do to minorities, gays, poor people, Muslim countries.

Not racing to the polls to vote AGAINST that would be the height of irresponsibility.

If Sec. Clinton becomes more liberal, it will only be because enough of us demand it. For all her failings, she is still capable of listening and responding, I believe.

Yeah, I could see someone claiming that stat.

prick to run his media campaign, as Jeb did, to someone who went out of her way to show support for gays

tough call eh

When this was floated several days ago, I tried to track down the basis of it and came up with nothing reliable.

The thread is here. What I found, from my post in that thread:

The assertion is based on this Daily Kos post. The Kos post tosses out some numbers, labels Clinton the 11th most liberal, and concludes, "If anyone tries to tell you differently, ask them to show their work."

Good advice -- so let's apply it to these authors. I clicked through some links and found a bewildering array of more links that lead mainly to more links and to some abstruse explanations of statistical techniques. What I didn't find was what I expected, namely the list of specific votes, with the explanation of what the "liberal" and "conservative" position on each was.

For example, here's Clinton's "National Environmental Scorecard" from the League of Conservation Voters (lifetime score: 82%). The LCV lists the specific votes it scored. If you think that some bills were wrongly included or wrongly omitted, or even that a particular vote should have been scored the opposite way, you have the LCV's data, and you can make your case that Clinton's score is too high or too low.

In a few minutes of clicking, I didn't find the equivalent for the claim that Clinton was the 11th most liberal Senator. I didn't give it the full-court press on research because I think people announcing a conclusion like this should make it reasonably easy for a reader to find the underlying list of votes. If some DUer with more patience than I has found that list, I'd be grateful to be enlightened.

I remember how, during the 2008 campaign, Rush Limbaugh and his ilk touted the National Journal ranking that had Obama as the most liberal Senator in 2007. Plenty of us thought at the time that this was ridiculous. As a liberal Democrat, I would've been delighted if we'd nominated such a liberal candidate, but I knew we hadn't. Events have borne out my belief.

Certainly, during Clinton's time in the Senate, there were plenty of conservative Democrats (the Max Baucus - Blanche Lincoln types), so I wouldn't expect to see her ranked as the least liberal Democrat. Before I give any weight to this purported ranking, though, I need to see the data.

Show your work.

In response to my criticism, nobody posted a list of the votes that were scored.

Upon further review, I find this passage in the Kos piece:

This would be the line-up midway through Hillary's tenure (listed by seniority). Taking into account the whole of their voting records (i.e., not just using the Iraq resolution as a litmus test), which names on it strike you as unarguably more liberal than Hillary?

I'd say Kennedy, Leahy, Kerry, Harkin, Boxer, Feingold, Wyden, Obama. That's eight. Add on maybe Biden (good liberal on some stuff, but also a shill for the credit card industry), maybe Durbin.

We could argue about who's more libereal, Cilnton or Carl Levin, Clinton or Patty Murray, etc. -- but saying there were only 10 senators who were clearly more liberal than here is not completely crazy.

To me, that says more about the hidebound nature of the Senate than about Clinton.

I am big fan of Obama, but I think that is what the stats show.

With Biden and Durbin, but figured I could make my point without starting that debate.

is someone saying that if HIllary is the nominee, they will NOT vote for her




Otherwise none of this matters unless like me you are trying to get Bernie to run and win, which I would love to see.

But I know he wont win.

etc