Presidential run 2020.

O'Rourke seems to be finished. As far as de Blasio is concerned, son rayonnement chez les Démocrates is nothing short of enormous, as pictured on the NY Post cover:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D6rxFrdW4AAC-Io.jpg

That cover is being *nice* to de Blasio.
At this point, it is hard to say who the final people will be, but I doubt anyone still polling at 1% or lower is going to suddenly catch fire.

Joe will need to get there first, no sure thing.

Meanwhile de Blasio found the surest way to Miami Cubans' heart:

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article232027297.html

I hope that none of our resident leftists and socialists are tempted to support Kamala "the cop" Harris for the Democratic nomination. Before you do, read this article first. She's a fake, a hypocrite, a liar, a race-hustler and an extreme, anti-prostitution, abolitionist feminist.

Kamala Harris Is a Cop Who Wants To Be President

The California senator and former prosecutor has a long record of pushing illiberal policies.

ELIZABETH NOLAN BROWN | FROM THE JULY 2019 ISSUE


In the years since former California Attorney General Kamala Harris entered national public life—first as a U.S. senator, now as a leading candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination—one strain of criticism has surfaced again and again. It can be captured in just five words: Kamala Harris is a cop.

The phrase, which the candidate's critics use frequently, is meant to conjure more than just Harris' history as a hard-nosed San Francisco prosecutor. It's colloquial. To label someone a cop in this way is never to invoke the best behavior one might expect from police officers. It implies the person is a bully, a bootlicker, a professional tattler—the sort of person who shuts down un-authorized lemonade stands run by kids. A cop, in this context, is someone who will always defer to authority and the status quo, someone who is unaccountable and not to be trusted. Calling someone a cop invokes the worst sorts of police overreach, a legalistic authoritarianism that exists for its own sake.

During her 28-year tenure as a county prosecutor, district attorney (D.A.), and state attorney general (A.G.), Harris proved quite willing to live up to the epithet. In the public eye, she spoke of racial justice and liberal values, bolstering her cred as one of the Democratic Party's rising stars. But behind closed doors, she repeatedly fought for more aggressive prosecution not just of violent criminals but of people who committed misdemeanors and "quality of life" crimes.
Every attorney general fights for state power and police prerogatives. It's part of the job. But over and over again, Harris went beyond the call of duty, fighting for harsher sentences, larger bail requirements, longer prison terms, more prosecution of petty crimes, greater criminal justice involvement in low-income and minority communities, less due process for people in the system, less transparency, and less accountability for bad cops.

In the early days of her presidential campaign, Harris has sought to define herself as a liberal reformer who has kept up with the times. But a review of her career shows a distinct penchant for power seeking and an illiberal disposition in which no offense is small or harmless enough to warrant lenience from the state. Now she wants to bring that approach to the highest office in the land.

The Path to Power

Harris was raised in Berkeley, California, the daughter of a Stanford economist and a respected breast cancer researcher. After her parents split up, she spent her high school years in Montreal, then attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., and the University of California's Hastings College of Law...

...
Kamala Harris vs. Sex Workers

Some of Harris' most revealing work has been related to prostitution. As a prosecutor, she ramped up stings in immigrant communities, opposed measures to legalize sex work (or simply to stop sex worker arrests), spread misinformation about human trafficking, ignored sexual misconduct by police, and aggressively targeted websites where sex workers advertised.

So it was a surprise last February when, asked by The Root whether she supports the "decriminalization of sex work," Harris said: "I think so. I do."
Had she evolved? Not really. Decriminalization advocates believe that neither selling nor buying sex should be subject to criminal penalties unless force, fraud, coercion, or minors are involved. But in the same interview, Harris spoke about the need to go after "johns," a.k.a. prostitution customers, along with "pimps and traffickers." At a CNN town hall in April, she again emphasized the importance of targeting customers.

What Harris was describing was a version of the "end demand" model, which treats buyers of commercial sex as criminals while allowing sex workers to avoid arrest under some conditions. It's an approach that replicates almost all of the problems of full criminalization, and it has been criticized by everyone from sex workers themselves to human rights and health groups such as Amnesty International and the World Health Organization.

Harris has talked about sex work this way for a long time. In January 2005, she told the Examiner that she agreed with "the spirit" of a proposal to impound cars belonging to those convicted of soliciting prostitution, because it's important "to hold accountable the true perpetrators of prostitution—the johns, the pimps, and the traffickers."

Despite her supposed openness to decriminalization, Harris has long advocated the arrest of adults selling sex, too. A 2008 measure in San Francisco would have stopped police from arresting adult sex workers. "It will allow workers to organize for our rights and for our safety," one advocate told the Associated Press at the time. It also would have prohibited the city from taking state or federal money for the racial profiling of Asian businesses.

The local Democratic Party backed the measure. Harris fought against it, saying it was a mistake to consider prostitution a victimless crime. She also encouraged local police to intensify crackdowns on adult prostitution, especially at Asian-owned massage parlors.

Harris did help launch a "safe house" for minors in the sex trade, modeled after Lois Lee's long-running Children of the Night program in Hollywood, which provides a shelter and services to teenagers picked up for prostitution. It was a step in the right direction—exactly the kind of tangible, noncarceral program needed to address underage sex work. But it could house only six girls at a time, at a cost of about $1 million per year. And while she spoke out against arresting minors for prostitution offenses, it still happened in practice.
Harris' attitude on these issues seems to stem from early in her career. In the '90s, she worked closely with nonprofits and fellow city officials on several anti–domestic violence campaigns. In 2003, when she was first running for D.A., coalitions "built up around issues of domestic violence and juvenile prostitution" were "central to the Harris campaign effort," the San Francisco Examiner noted at the time.

In the late '90s and early '00s, many groups concerned about domestic violence began shifting their focus to "human trafficking." Soon, Harris started pushing for a law to make human trafficking a crime in California.

This was largely redundant: Forcing others into labor or sex was already illegal under a host of state laws. Still, the new legislation, enacted in 2006, was at least nominally concerned with coerced labor.

When it passed, "detectives dramatically stepped up their investigations, helped by federal grants aimed at finding trafficking rings," the Los Angeles Times noted in 2006. Police forces received money for training officers, buying "sophisticated surveillance equipment," and paying informants.

These federal-local police partnerships to "fight trafficking" were mainly used in undercover prostitution stings, with the bulk of arrests focused on sex workers themselves or their customers. Contrary to the stated purpose of the law, prosecutions and convictions for actual human trafficking were rare. But as the moral panic around what Harris called "modern slavery" heated up, she would join a coalition demanding that Craigslist, Backpage, and other classified-advertising sites and web forums that host user-generated ads be blamed and punished.

Harris was sworn in as state attorney general in 2011, just as calls to "end demand" for prostitution were getting a turbocharge from celebrity campaigns, federal funding, and a few motivated ideologues. In 2013, Harris joined 46 other state attorneys general in asking Congress to amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a measure the Electronic Frontier Foundation calls "the most important law protecting free speech on the Internet."

Section 230 says that digital platforms and service providers shouldn't be treated as the speakers of user-generated content and that they are thus immune under state (but not federal) law from legal liability for things that people use their products to say. At the time, this factored into an array of state cases against web platforms: Prosecutors were routinely shot down by judges on the grounds that their prosecutions were illegal.

It wasn't long before some members of Congress took up the A.G.s' request, presenting various bills to gut Section 230 under the guise of fighting "the growth of internet-facilitated child sex trafficking."

It would be a few years before the effort saw success. In the meantime, in January 2015, Harris announced her candidacy for the U.S. Senate. She also acted, in her role as California attorney general, like Section 230 didn't exist.

A month before the 2016 election, Harris and Texas A.G. Ken Paxton hadCarl Ferrer, the CEO of Backpage, arrested on a warrant for pimping, pimping of a minor, and conspiracy. The site's founders, Michael Lacey and James Larkin, were also arrested and charged with conspiracy.

Backpage had become the most visible target in the political fight against sex trafficking. The A.G.s behind the operation worked from the theory that because the site had failed to filter out all instances of teenagers posting ads while pretending to be adults, and because some of these ads eventually led to minors getting paid for sex, the owners and managers of Backpage were guilty of "child sex trafficking."

In December 2016, a judge tossed the case. "Congress did not wish to hold liable online publishers for the action of publishing third party speech," wrote Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Michael Bowman. "Congress has spoken on this matter and it is for Congress, not this court, to revisit."

By then, Harris had won her Senate race and would soon be on her way to Washington. Once there, she would indeed push Congress to revisit the law. But she had three days left in the California A.G.'s office; she used them to bring another case against Ferrer, Lacey, and Larkin, this time alleging pimping and money laundering. (A judge would again reject the pimping charges, though the money laundering case is still open.)...

Patron said:

I did not think I wouid find anyone in the world I could like less than Trump, then along came Kamala.

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/peo...-tshirts-hollow-and-calculated-174408165.html

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It's no small coincidence that what is primarily motivating most Democratic primary voters is a candidate that can beat Trump, not liberal bona fides. It's the reason Biden was first in polling. So while Kamala Harris or even Biden are undesirable for a few reasons, Trump has set the bar so low that it would take something extraordinary for anyone to look worse than him. Harris' poor past decisions will be water under the bridge for people who dislike Trump.

My understanding of busing is that it's equally unpopular to white and black people. But once the Democratic nominee is picked and that nominee can position him or herself to attract moderate voters too (if that person is a progressive), it won't matter what Harris did decades ago. She'll be going up against a guy who partially defended himself against a rape accusation by saying his purported victim is not his type, to pick one recent example of Trump's interminable odium.

You can successfully accuse Harris of pandering; being dumb isn't a charge that will stick against her. The last few weeks for Biden are fresh reminders that Biden always finds a way to torpedo himself by just opening his mouth. (And he's going to sabotage himself again before the primaries are over). Cory Booker tried to make an issue out of Biden's words well before the debate, but it was Harris that successfully capitalized off them with a personal message related to the topic. The only person who gave either Senator such an opening was Biden himself with his tone-deaf words. Of all his years in the Senate, he couldn't find a better example of bipartisanship than working in tandem with pro-segregation Senators? Dumb.

Always on point , Mr. Carmine.

Carmine Falcone said:

Trump has set the bar so low that it would take something extraordinary for anyone to look worse than him.

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Exactly. Only one person on the face of the earth could conceivably manage this feat. And who knows, maybe she will run again, she never said she wouldn't. There is still plenty of time.

There is no better candidate for the presidential election than Trump for 2020...Are you guys fuckin brain dead! Trump has been the greatest US president of all time!

You guys think you would have been better off with a loser like Obama or Hillary Clinton or even Joe Biden...What is this "The just for laughs American politics festival!...Ha! Ha! Ha!...please!

Trump is the only candidate that has the USA's interests at heart!...He's the Terry Fox of the USA!

Are you US Merbites fuckin serious!...my take is that your brains are so permafrosted from coming over the border into Canada that your brains have been perpetually fuckin' frozen!

sharkman sometimes i do not understand your sarcasm... wtf?

jalimon said:

sharkman sometimes i do not understand your sarcasm... wtf?

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Jali you've always got something stupid to say if it doesn't suit your agenda!...lol!

sharkman said:

Jali you've always got something stupid to say if it doesn't suit your agenda!

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Haha true you did make me laugh here. You see the beauty here is me and you are so fucking different. But this hobby makes me still like you a lot

Ha! Ha!..right you are Jali!...en plein ça!

:fencing:

Kamala Harris is nothing but an opportunist with no real vision.

I actually studied one of Elizabeth Warren's text books in grad school. She actually is a person of substance, whether we like her or her politics.

Joe Bidden is way too old, as is Bernie Sanders.

The democrats are in such disarray now that Trump will beat any of them hands down. The Dems will doom themselves, without Trump having to do anything.

I thought Andrew Cuomo would be a strongest contender against Trump. But I don't think he'll run; too late at this time. The "disgraced" Eliot Spitzer would have been a strong contender too.

I think Eric Swalwell as presidential candidate and Amy Klobuchar as his running mate would likely be the strongest contender -- if America were ready for a female president, which I don't believe we are yet, than I'd say Amy Klobuchar would be the strongest candidate because she's not as leftist and radical as the other candidates; she's true blue blood.

Trump, if her were reelected, would likely be less erratic and he wouldn't be shackled by the ghosts of the 2016 election -- which is way too complicated to describe succinctly; way way too many factors, including the arcane electoral college system, that resulted in a Trump victory.

ShyMan said:

I think Eric Swalwell as presidential candidate ... would likely be the strongest contender

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Alas, we won't have a chance to test this theory. His immense intellectual firepower will be missed, no question.

ShyMan said:

I think Eric Swalwell as presidential candidate and Amy Klobuchar as his running mate would likely be the strongest contender...

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If Eric Swalwell knew even one person thought he was the best choice, he wouldn't have quit yesterday. Shy Man, you'd be doing America a favor by naming your best candidate. Your magic touch means he or she will drop out exactly 24 hours later.

I said Kamala Harris was pandering a few posts ago and that observation has only become even more apparent. Never mind that there are already loans for first-time buyers or low-income people. Here she comes making home ownership about race as if there aren't plenty of non-black people with low incomes. I'm certain that relative to white people, home ownership rates within the African American community is lower. And for what it's worth, black people were severely affected by the housing crisis for a myriad of reasons; some of those reasons were beyond their control. But proposing a fund solely for black people plays right into the identity politics that Republicans accuse Democrats of. I won't be thrilled to vote for either her or Biden should either of them earn the nomination.

Patron, at least you did your research on Kamala this time :deadhorse:

Uncle Joe should just buy ‘Mad Dog’ a beer (preferably Busch) & strategize Biden-Mattis 2020.

Kamala has zero chance against Trump - Racism & sexism runs deep among the Americans who actually vote. Besides, she has already been painted as an opportunist who slept her way to the top, Trump is gonna rip her to shreds on that and drown out whatever she has to say.

Let me make a bold prediction:

There will be zero presidential debates prior to the upcoming election. Donald Trump will refuse to hold any debates since he knows fully well he'll be embarrassed in front of the world.

If i'm the democratic nominee's campaign chair i'd play dirty if there are debates. I'd have the 13-year old who accused Trump of raping her in attendance and i'd also invite all the 20+ women who have accused Trump of sexually assaulting them. Trump started this trend three years ago in the debates so it's time for retaliation.