Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign megathread

[GeneralMacArthur]

This article is from 1993, shortly after Bernie Sanders voted against the Brady Bill.  This isn't some rape fantasy he wrote in the 70s, this is the middle of this political career when he had already been in elected office for over a decade.

I personally don't think these gun control attacks are going to be very effective, for the same reason the racism attacks on Biden are ineffective -- it's just overwhelmingly obvious that's not what he believes today.

But damn, if there's another mass shooting during the primary, some PAC running well-crafted ads with "BERNIE SANDERS ANTI-GUN CONTROL" could be a race-ender.

[GeneralMacArthur]

The thing with Sanders on gun control is that this probably was, at least in part, him pandering to his constituents and generally doing what a normal politician does. Problem with that defense though is that he is supposed to be a conviction politician, and if he's just a normal politician that undercuts a key part of his candidacy.

Isn't "Bernie is a saint who stands his ground and fights to the death for his convictions" supposed to be one of the main arguments for why he will be able to pass his fantasy legislation?

If he can't pass his legislation, his entire candidacy falls apart.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Yeah Bernie "The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails!" Sanders definitely cost Clinton the election with his personal attacks on her.

Yeah, about that.  He did a full 180 once the primary actually started, as he did on so many other aspects of his early civility.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csn4a0jnfj0

[GeneralMacArthur]

https://twitter.com/HoarseWisperer/status/1160936759510917122

LMAO, Brie Joy, the rabid Jill Stein supporter from 2016 who is now national press secretary for Bernie Sanders, was so upset about this that she called for doxxing Hoarse Whisperer and retweeted a video of some loser recording the MSNBC segment on his phone while yelling impotently at the TV.

https://twitter.com/briebriejoy/status/1161500954660921345

[GeneralMacArthur]

And now Hoarse Whisperer has been doxxed.  Congratulations to Briahna and the entire Sanders campaign for demonstrating effective leadership in these perilous days where some people on Twitter don't like Bernie.  Very cool!

You know,

you never hear the Harris campaign complaining about the biased fake news media when they have to endure a week of unfavorable coverage.

you never see the national press secretary of the Biden campaign highlighting randos on twitter and calling for them to be doxxed as punishment for criticizing Uncle Joe.

you never see hordes of rabid Elizabeth Warren fans descending on their enemies and seeking to destroy their lives over political disagreements.

you never see Buttigieg fans going to the comments of every critic on Twitter and posting the nastiest vitriol imaginable and drowning every thread in a gish gallop of BS.

It's just the Sanders campaign.  All this stuff is just Bernie.  All these people only like Bernie.

Sometimes they also like Tulsi.  But Tulsi is really just a spin-off of the Bernie campaign.  She is only prominent because she made a big show of quitting the DNC to come be a Sanders stan, and she's being propped up by all the same YouTube and Twitter personalities who loved Bernie in 2016.

But for the most part,

all the horrible people on Twitter are Bernie supporters.  Some of them even work for his campaign.

all the people who voted for Jill Stein in 2016 are Bernie supporters.  Some of them even work for his campaign.

all the biggest left-wing grifters and scam artists are Bernie supporters.  Some of them even work for his campaign.

It's like there's one world that everyone else running for president lives in and an entirely separate, standalone world where Bernie and his followers live.

[GeneralMacArthur]

all the horrible people on Twitter are Bernie supporters. 

All of them? OK.

As far as Russian trolls go, Sanders has cornered the market, again.
Though admittedly many of them are doing double duty for Tulsi this cycle.

Russian trolls but also people like the Gravel teens who just spew unhinged vitriol at all the other candidates.  If you see a leftist on Twitter saying Joe Biden has brain damage and needs to be euthanized, Hillary Clinton has Parkinsons and rapes children, Kamala is a racist murderer of black men, Warren is a traitor to the left for endorsing Hillary, Buttigieg is the wrong kind of gay, etc. It's guaranteed they support Bernie Sanders.

And that doesn't even get started on the tankies.  100% of people who think Lenin and Mao were justified in their mass-murders of businessmen, landlords, landowners and educated professionals also support Bernie Sanders.

[GeneralMacArthur]

all the horrible people on Twitter are Bernie supporters. 

All of them? OK.

As far as Russian trolls go, Sanders has cornered the market, again.
Though admittedly many of them are doing double duty for Tulsi this cycle.

Russian trolls but also people like the Gravel teens who just spew unhinged vitriol at all the other candidates.  If you see a leftist on Twitter saying Joe Biden has brain damage and needs to be euthanized, Hillary Clinton has Parkinsons and rapes children, Kamala is a racist murderer of black men, Warren is a traitor to the left for endorsing Hillary, Buttigieg is the wrong kind of gay, etc. It's guaranteed they support Bernie Sanders.

And that doesn't even get started on the tankies.  100% of people who think Lenin and Mao were justified in their mass-murders of businessmen, landlords, landowners and educated professionals also support Bernie Sanders.

See, I've seen much more vitriol from former Hillary supporters than Bernie supporters. They've been quite civil wrt my disagreements on Gabbard (who, through following the money, I believe to be a fraud). None of the rage I've seen - just simple debate and the occasional AAD dislike.

The Centrist Cult, however, is another story.

Hahahahaha yes I hate how whenever you see a celebrity supporting Bernie Sanders on Twitter their replies and mentions are drowned with an army of rabid, furious Joe Biden and John Delaney fans competing with each other for the nastiest burn.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Clicked on this thread thinking people would be discussing Bernie’s new climate plan. I don’t know what I expected.

Well, it's not much of a plan, it's just the same sh**t that's in all the other candidates plans but with far less detail/logistics, with all the spending multiplied by 5 to give him the "bigger number", and a bunch of ludicrous proposals for how to pay for it.

So to get this straight, we're adding $32T (optimistic figure) for single-payer, we're adding $4T for free college, and now we're adding $16T for his "Green New Deal."  So taking Bernie's extremely optimistic numbers, that's at minimum $52T in new spending from just three plans, and it's only August!

His proposals for how to pay for all this are laughably atrocious on their face, but on top of that, he's proposed the same method of financing for multiple different plans.  You can only tax the wealthy so much before you run out of money or run out of wealthy people.  Bernie would need to triple federal revenue to pay for this stuff.

You could eliminate 100% of defense spending and it would only cover about 12% of the cost of Bernie's plans.  If you raised taxes on the 1% to 100% of all income and capital gains, it would pay for about 22% of the cost, assuming none of them leave the country (lol).  If you tripled corporate taxes, it would cover 11%.

But really it's insulting how other candidates like Biden, Buttigieg, Inslee, Delaney can come up with far more detailed and realistic environmental plans -- plans that would actually stand a chance of being implemented -- and get no media attention, but Bernie comes out with essentially a wishlist and the media is all over it.  This is the problem with our politics right now.  The better you would be at actually governing, the less attention you get, because details are boring.

I understand that y'all are like "well money doesn't matter when the future of the world is at stake!" but to make an analogy, let's say you can currently run a 5 minute mile, and Biden et al are saying they want to get it down to a 4:30 or 4:15 mile.  That's really ambitious and close to Olympian times.  But Bernie comes along and says, f*** that, we're running a thirty-second mile.  It's just not physically possible!  But of course then everyone criticizes Biden for not being ambitious enough.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Mother Jones take on Bernie's new climate plan.  It's a short read:

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/08/bernie-sanders-gets-a-d-for-his-climate-plan/

[GeneralMacArthur]

Mother Jones take on Bernie's new climate plan.  It's a short read:

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/08/bernie-sanders-gets-a-d-for-his-climate-plan/

Here's a response to his plan that isn't a weird angry twitter rant:

https://theintercept.com/2019/08/22/bernie-sanders-climate-policy/

You are really citing the Bernie rag The Intercept as unbiased news? Of all the news sources you decided to go for the site that employs American traitor Green Greenwald?

I actually read the article (hey, I was bored at lunch) and it's literally just a really long rehashing of Bernie's plan with a lot of "this is great, this is so great, isn't this great you guys" fluff to pad the length.

Hilarious that Mother Jones is a "weird angry twitter rant" now (note -- no disagreement with the actual content of the piece).  Is Mother Jones now on the enemies list?

[GeneralMacArthur]

Mother Jones take on Bernie's new climate plan.  It's a short read:

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/08/bernie-sanders-gets-a-d-for-his-climate-plan/

POSTSCRIPT: It’s probably worth noting that I haven’t looked at the climate plans from other candidates. So I’m not comparing Sanders to anyone else. For all I know, all the other plans are just as bad.

So funny thing.  Biden's is https://joebiden.com/climate/.  But if you Google "Joe Biden climate", the first four results are opinion pieces about how Joe Biden either "doesn't have a climate plan", he has a climate plan but it's "crumbling", or his climate plan is a disaster or inferior to other candidates.  The actual climate plan is like the fifth link down.

But Biden's climate plan is excellent and very detailed -- much more so than Bernie's.

Embrace the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, adding momentum to curbing hydrofluorocarbons, an especially potent greenhouse gas, which could deliver a 0.5 degree Celsius reduction in global warming by mid-century.

No financing dirty energy. President Biden will ensure the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), the Export-Import Bank, and the new U.S. International Development Finance Corporation significantly reduce the carbon footprints of their portfolios. For example, these agencies will be prohibited from any financing for coal-fired power plants so that U.S. finance is no longer a dirtier alternative to the World Bank.

Pursue a global moratorium on offshore drilling in the Arctic and reestablish climate change as a priority for the Arctic Council. The Arctic poses profound national security challenges as its physical make-up changes due to extreme warming in the Arctic region. Yet, the Trump Administration has refused to allow the Arctic Council to even use the words “climate change.” Biden will elevate climate change to the top of the priority list for the Council, and focus on reducing two short-lived but highly potent pollutants, black carbon and methane

With respect to freight: A Biden Administration will pursue projects like a bridge that connects Oregon and Washington State that moves not only trucks but rail transit, and the completion of the CREATE project in Chicago that could cut in half the time it takes vital goods to move through the country.

Guarantee you Bernie's team doesn't know what any of these things are.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Joe Biden's plan is crap & F-. The total loss due to climate change will be 40+ T$ as per economists & his 1T$ over 10 years is nowhere near sufficient.

Why is it better to spend more money?  If you can achieve a better result with less money, that's a good thing!  Bernie and his supporters are addicted to just throwing an infinite amount of money at problems rather than actually trying to find a good solution.  Why not just pay all 7 billion people in the world $100,000 each if they pinky promise to never pollute again?  That would cost 700 trillion dollars, and that is a way bigger number so it must be better than Bernie's plan, right?

School Bus emissions - 407B$ in grants to replace ageing school buses. Bus emissions have 40 different chemicals & air pollutants including carcinogens & school children are exposed to these @ levels 5-15 times higher than others.

School buses are a really specific area that Bernie decided to focus on for some reason rather than diversifying his spending portfolio.  Biden has plans for complete electrificiation of U.S. vehicles, including freight, shipping and public transportation, by year 2050.  Biden wins here because
A)  Electrifying 100% of all vehicles > emissions standards for school buses
B)  Biden proposes a combination of executive orders, regulations, new government bodies and re-use of existing infrastructure to combat the problem, which is far more realistic than Bernie's plan to get the GOP Congress to give him $407B (15x more than Trump's wall) to throw at school buses.

$40 billion for a climate justice resiliency fund for under-resourced groups like Native Americans, people with disabilities, and the elderly to prepare for climate change

This is literally meaningless and just a way for him to check off boxes for "helped disadvantaged group X."

The funny thing is, the Obama administration already had tons of protections for these communities!  Trump rolled them back.  Just rolling them forward would do far more good than throwing $40B at the problem with no plan, and be much cheaper.  But if that wasn't enough for you, look up "IV. STAND UP TO THE ABUSE OF POWER BY POLLUTERS WHO DISPROPORTIONATELY HARM COMMUNITIES OF COLOR AND LOW-INCOME COMMUNITIES" in Biden's plan.

$200 billion for the United Nations Green Climate Fund to help other countries reduce their emissions

Yeah, the UNGCF is the only international body Bernie knows about, so he invented a random number and said, let's throw them that money.  $200 billion!  Sure why not.
In contrast, Biden's plan is chock-full of international bodies and organizations and infrastructure he wants to work with, and lays out how he would build an international symphony to respond on every level to every challenge.  He specifically identifies problems at a very granular level.  At one point, Biden goes region-by-region through the United States identifying major problems affecting that particular region he wants to focus on.  Isn't that way better?

I could keep going.  But I think you get the point.  Bernie wants to just pick out pipe dreams or names and fling arbitrary amounts of money at them.  Not only would this never actually happening (so Bernie would be the do-nothing presidency) but it's an insultingly unintellectual response to the emergency.
Biden, on the other hand, has an extremely in-depth knowledge of the current system and knows exactly which buttons to press, which organizations to work with, which powers to give to what bodies, which executive orders to write, what policy to adapt to which countries, etc. and that's all before he even spends a single dime, because he also proposes tons of responsible new spending to tackle a broad set of challenges!

Yet somehow Biden's plan is a "disaster", an "F-", "crap", "nowhere near sufficient."  One day ten years from now you're gonna look back and cringe at all the things you wrote on Atlas, man.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Thank you for the response, though I wasn't asking you to tell me a about Biden's plan (or throw a cheap and untrue insult in Bernie's general direction). Perhaps you misunderstood my post, the part in the quote was from the Mother Jones article you linked. It clearly shows that whoever wrote the article isn't very trustworthy when it comes to reviewing climate change plans. I am not ignorant of the plans of other candidates, and I can tell you that Bernie's plan is still better than Biden's.

I interpreted your post as implying that the other candidates' plans were in fact worse than Bernie's (as was also implied by the author's postscript).  If my interpretation was wrong, I apologize.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Do you want me to reply

no

[GeneralMacArthur]

Still waiting for Bernie to eliminate my mortgage.

Damn bro I picked the wrong debt to pay down.

[GeneralMacArthur]

There's a reason Bernie highlights "individual contributions" instead of "individual contributors."

His campaign has a strategy of encouraging supporters to break large contributions into as many tiny contributions as possible.  

100 people donating $100 can be offset by one person donating $3000 in 1000 $3 increments.  That's 101 people donating $13,000, but they report "1100 individual donations with an average size of $11!")

The further down in the campaign hierarchy you get, the more explicit these instructions become.



This strategy is easy to discover because the most egregious contributors are highlighted in the massive FEC violation reports that the FEC writes every quarter about Bernie's campaign.

On top of that, Bernie routinely accepts far more than the federal limit for contributions.  So you don't even have to stop at $2800.  You can donate $30,000 in $3 increments and it will go on the record as 10,000 individual contributions.  Plenty of people did that in 2016, which is why Bernie's FEC violations report was historically long -- 600+ pages, far far far longer than any other campaign in history.

https://mobile.twitter.com/Eviljohna/status/1167824600341913601

https://mobile.twitter.com/Eviljohna/status/1167853823995580416

https://mobile.twitter.com/Eviljohna/status/1167858380980883456

[GeneralMacArthur]

Every damn campaign highlights this. As a matter of fact, Bernie is stupid because he is the only candidate who brings unique donors. He did that in 2016 with the 2.5M donors & 8M+ contributions.

He has done it here with talk of 1M contributors & donors time & again. On the other hand, people like Warren & Pete & Joe & Harris all tout number of donations.

No. of unique donors will be less than half of number of donations. Sanders has double the donors that Warren or Pete has. So when he says 1M donors & a Pete or a Warren touts 1M or 0.8-0.9M donations, it is confusing for the average joe who think there is no gap when Sanders has double the Number of donors than anyone else.

Can you modify your post to not quote all the tweets?  They take up quite a lot of space and there's no need to quote them.  I always just quote text.

Show me one other campaign that does this.  All the other campaigns have been obsessed with

• How much money raised
• How many donors

especially how many donors because it's a debate criteria.  For instance, Buttigieg announced that he had collected "$24.8 million from 294,000 donors."

Bernie, on the other hand, obsesses over

• Average contribution value (the lower the better)
• Number of individual contributions

So in contrast with Buttigieg, Bernie announces "2.5 million contributions averaging $17 each."

But the difference is that the first two metrics are straightforward:  How much money did you raise, how many people gave you money?
The second metric is easy to game.  Just get one person to contribute 1000 times, as the Bernie campaign is explicitly doing, and you've gamed your way to better-sounding metrics.

I don't see any other campaign ONLY announcing the number of individual contributions.  Sometimes, they announce both, like Biden had "436,000 donations from more than 256,000 donors."

But Bernie is the ONLY CANDIDATE who announces just individual contribution numbers.  And he is the ONLY CANDIDATE whose campaign apparatus goes around encouraging people to donate in tiny increments to game the numbers.  He is the ONLY CANDIDATE to have mountains upon mountains of FEC violations as a direct result of this and other shady campaign finance strategies.

[GeneralMacArthur]

You need years of therapy, loser.  Seek help.

k

[GeneralMacArthur]

Shadows, whenever anyone criticizes Bernie you just ignore the point and post a bunch of other positive stuff about Bernie.  It's really annoying.

Yes, other candidates have also reported the number of individual contributions.  Nobody is disputing that.  I explicitly said in my post that Biden said "X donations from Y donors."

But Bernie is the one going around the country crowing about his average donation.  Every single speech, he says "Our campaign received 3 million donations!  And do you know what the average donation was?  Twenty-seven dollars!"  or whatever the numbers are now.

No other candidate does this, because they know that number is meaningless.  Bernie is the only candidate making a big deal out of it.  In fact it is a critical part of his campaign platform, that he is the working-class candidate because he has the lowest donation number, while his opponents are all being bribed by big money interests.

No other candidate ONLY reports the contribution number in their press releases and fundraising.  The Bernie campaign reports only that number, not any of the other ones.  It is intentionally misleading to make him sound more popular than he is.

And no other candidate EXPLICITLY ENCOURAGES their supporters to break up single donations into multiple smaller donations to rig the number.  The Bernie campaign is the only campaign to do this.  It is intentionally misleading to make him look more grassrootsy than he actually is.

Yes, Bernie also has the most donors.  We knew this would happen, because he is the only candidate with an existing fundraising apparatus and mailing list; the other candidates all started from scratch.  But that's a complete non sequiter.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Bernie raised $46.3 million through Q2, from 746,000 donors.

His average donation was therefore 46,300,000 / 746,000 = $62.06

But that doesn't sound as grassrootsy, salt-of-the-earth-y, working-class-y as $11, does it?

[GeneralMacArthur]

The overwhelming majority of the world's pollution comes from just a few major corporations

This stat has been bandied about in far-left circles a lot lately, but it's extremely misleading.

Yes, Saudi Aramco is "responsible" for a lot of the world's pollution if you attribute all the pollution caused by the oil they produce to them.  But in reality, they produce oil, and it's used by millions of people.  The socialists like to blame everything on corporations and absolve the proletariat from responsibility or accountability.  But in reality, if you drive a car, it's your fault for polluting, not Saudi Aramco's for drilling the oil that turned into gasoline for your car.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Given berni's age and love of post birth black baby abortions, i want him to show his surgery records. I want to see how many kideneys and livers he's had. Especialy chinese surgery records.

wut