Tulsi Gabbard was flat-out lying about a lot of Harris' record, and that Putin and Assad stooge deserves zero credit for pretty much anything she said in that debate.
CNN:
Quote:
Facts First: It's true that, as a prosecutor, Harris advocated for higher bail amounts as a way to fight what she said was a public safety issue, supporting raising cash bail costs for gun-related crimes shortly after being elected San Francisco's district attorney in 2004. But she also introduced legislation as a senator in 2017 to "reform or replace the practice of money bail."
Speaking at a May 2004 event, audio of which was first reported by the Free Beacon, Harris argued the city's low bail meant people came to commit cheaper crimes in San Francisco.
That same year, San Francisco's Superior Court drastically increased cash bail costs for weapon-related felony charges. The cost doubled and even tripled in some cases.
In 2017, however, as a senator, Harris introduced legislation along Sen. Rand Paul to encourage changes or replacement of the cash bail system, which requires those awaiting trial to put up a specified amount of money to be released from jail.
"It's long past time to address bail reform across the country," Harris said in a February 2019 tweet. "Too often, poor people sit in jail because they don't have the money to pay bail, while someone with the same offense but money in their back pocket gets out. This is a serious injustice."
In her book "The Truths We Hold," Harris also writes that she knew, as a prosecutor, that lower-income families were affected by the cash bail system.
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Russian stooge logic is that what you did 15 years ago reflects your current beliefs more than what you did 2 years ago. Or probably, more accurately, Russian stooge logic is just to fucking lie about everything.
I'm not particularly interested in going on a point-by-point rebuttal of your long series of straw men, and in fact I honestly just skimmed it in parts because it was such a grossly bad-faith misreading. Also, learn to use some fucking paragraph breaks once in a while.
I, of all people, am certainly not in favour of the status quo. In fact, I despise the status quo, which is literally an existential threat to people like me. However, my attitude to the status quo isn't going to do a fucking thing to erase its existence. The status quo is completely indifferent to my feelings about it. I would probably be better off to hate glaciers - those may well disappear in my lifetime. (However, that is
precisely one of the aspects of the status quo that I can't stand.)
No less a source than Noam Chomsky emphasizes again and again that it's necessary for radicals to engage with actually existing power structures in order to change them, rather than simply disengage from the system entirely. Is Noam Chomsky a supporter of the status quo? According to your logic, he is. He advocates voting for even imperfect Democrats in swing states, for instance, and acknowledges that many people are compromised by the very nature of late-stage capitalism.
The campaign finance system absolutely should not exist, but if we do not win in 2020, we may very never get another chance to reshape it. I don't know how much attention you're paying to what the Nazis in control of our government are doing, especially to our most vulnerable residents. If you were paying enough attention, perhaps you wouldn't be writing lengthy bad-faith attacks on people you are ostensibly allied with. If Republicans are allowed another four years to hollow out our government, there may be nothing left to save. The climate certainly doesn't have that long to wait.
The problem is that governments are elected with a limited amount of political capital, and all the wishing in the world isn't going to change that. Obama had a grand total of two years with a Democratic Senate and House, but even that's a colossal overstatement, because there was a filibuster-proof majority for about five months. With Joe "Judas" Lieberman as the 60th vote.
There are structural factors baked into our system that make it virtually impossible for the president's party not to lose seats in the midterm elections. The Democrats had an unusually poor showing in 2010, to be fair, but I've never been clear on what exactly Obama's critics on the left think he should have done to stop the losses entirely, especially given the machine of voter suppression that went all-in against his administration.
For all the Monday morning quarterbacking I've read of the Obama administration, I've never seen anything that qualifies as, y'know, a plan for how he could've stopped the backlash to his policies. The Tea Party was guaranteed to happen one way or the other, especially when the economy didn't get better overnight. (It doesn't help at all that many of the people critical of the Democrats' showing during this time period attribute numerous tasks to the DNC that are actually the province of the DCCC and DSCC, but that's a rant for another day.)
This entire case study is exhibit A in why the filibuster should be nuked Day One of the next Democratic administration, and the fact that Warren is the only candidate who has demonstrated a clear-eyed understanding of this is part and parcel of why she is #1 on my candidate list, but even that will only give us two years,
if we're even able to take the Senate - a part of Adam's argument I notice you provided no response to.
The problem, again, is that new administrations are elected with limited political capital. I think it's obvious that climate has to be the #1 priority. #2 and #3 will probably have to be elections and the economy. Good luck getting anything else past the Senate when Joe Manchin is the deciding vote, as he is exceedingly likely to be. Hell, we'll be fortunate to get anything on climate done at all with that setup. It'll be a miracle if we adequately address the top three items on my list. I don't hold out much hope that we'll get them all. Expecting more would be outright magical thinking.
So what's your alternative solution? Revolution? Good luck with that. You probably won't get it to happen when people are as desperate as many of them currently are, anyway. People tend not to revolt when they're too worried about where their next meal is going to come from. Contrary to common belief, most revolutionaries tend to be from the middle and upper classes.
Without a revolution (which is not going to happen) or a second constitutional convention (which would
not go well for us), we're stuck with the levers of power where they are in this shitty timeline we're in. Refusing to engage with them because we don't like them won't win us any elections.
We are essentially in an undeclared civil war. Our opponents certainly aren't going to stop taking every advantage they can. It would be fucking imbecilic for us to cede advantages because we don't feel ~comfortable~ taking them. We'll be a lot less comfortable when Miami, D.C., and New York City are underwater because we didn't get enough power to stop climate change.
And I doubt Jay Inslee approves of bad-faith attacks on leftists and liberals either, and I'm sure that he also recognises it's necessary to get Republicans out of office so his plans can even get enacted.
In short, fuck off until you're actually willing to engage with what I write.