State of the Discussion

I'm trying to coin a term for an analysis that is a derivative of the mathematical function of the Cult Of The Savvy, sort of a one step removed meta analysis of meta Beltway divination.

I'm going with Dilbertesque for now.

As far as I can tell from the front pages of their website, they seem to have two different things going on.

CNN doesn't seem to have any purely positive Bernie stories, based on those three headlines I mentioned above.

MSNBC seems to be talking about how much tougher it will be for Bernie this time around and, yes, the headline about how he seems to have raised $3.3 million so far.

So it looks like CNN is interested in only talking about Bernie through one context and MSNBC was doing similar but the news that Bernie did...

Well, we don't know about how well he did. Apparently this is well within what we ought to have expected from Bernie...

The news that Bernie is meeting expectations.

But if we get rid of the headlines that mention facts and only look at the ones that editorialize, is there a pattern that we can see?

I mean, taking into account how it's early yet? Or should I conclude that it's too early to tell and I shouldn't even look for patterns among the headlines that might be editorializing?

Because I am 100% down with the argument that it's too early to look for a narrative just yet.

He hasn't even been running for a day, yet, Stillwater.

The narrative isn't established. We don't know what it will be when it is established.

Personally, I think that the information that Bernie has raised $4 million so far will shatter any attempt to create a narrative that Bernie doesn't have a chance...

But I am not the journalist who said, and let me copy and paste this:

"If Bernie Sanders announces for president, and no one hears it… The Sanders announcement not rating as a lead story on CNN/MSNBC."

But let's check what CNN has on its front page right now.

Do a search for "Bernie" and I see three headlines:

"Trump comments on Bernie Sanders"
"5 Reasons to be skeptical about Bernie Sanders"
and
"Bernie Sanders lost in 2016. Here's what he needs to do in 2020."

Let's look at MSNBC:

There are two headlines.

"This time around, Bernie Sanders has a tougher sale: himself"
and
"Bernie Sanders raises $3.3 million hours after 2020 announcement"

So that's what I see on CNN and MSNBC.

There isn't a timestamp on that last one, but I assume it was written after Bernie raised $3.3 million and not before.

The invisible primary continues... but, sadly, we might have needed a new "we the people" first.

I wonder if it would be more irritating for me, personally, if I retyped the first word of my comment above or if I copied and pasted it.

I also wonder if I ought to have used a different word than "coalesces" because that one seems to be read as identical to "has completed" and I more intended a word that meant "begins the process of coming together".

Here's a story from Valentine's Day that may or may not be particularly relevant:

DNC announces fundraising, polling thresholds for early debates

The Democratic National Committee will limit its first presidential debates this year to 20 candidates, dividing the field over two nights, if necessary, and requiring candidates to meet either a fundraising or polling threshold to participate, a DNC official said Thursday.

The first debate will be broadcast on NBC News, MSNBC and Telemundo on consecutive weekday nights in June, the official said. The second debate will be broadcast by CNN on consecutive weekday nights in July. The DNC and those networks will use random selection to arrange the candidate lineups for each night.

…

For its first two debates this year, the DNC said a candidate may qualify for the stage either by reaching 1 percent support in three separate polls — including national polls or early nominating state polls — or by meeting a grass-roots fundraising threshold.

For the first debate, a candidate seeking to qualify through the fundraising method must receive donations from 65,000 people in at least 20 different states, the DNC official said.

I don't know what the expectation ought to have been. I don't know when I need to switch from "okay, that's what I expected" to "huh, that's pretty good".

Kamala’s first 24 hours: $1.5 millionKlobuchar’s first 48 hours $1 millionWarren’s first 24 hours: $300KBernie’s first 12 hours: $3.3 million— Andrew Kimmel (@andrewkimmel) February 20, 2019

It's apparently over $4 million now (from 150,000 people... that's, um, an average of 26 dollars and 66.666666666666666666666666667 cents).

Obama was not calm; he had an affectation of calm. He was as thin-skinned and nasty as our current president. He wasn't cautious; he was inept. He thought he could charm his agenda through Congress, and couldn't. When he realized that, he resorted to his pen and his phone. Again, just like Trump. And he wasn't conciliatory; he was more of a race-baiter than Trump has been (at least, if you look at the total amount of damage he did to race relations).

Sure it is. I can’t believe you’re (still) arguing this.

I find it difficult to believe you'd hold a Dem to this standard. It's real easy to picture HRC in office and having ethical problems.

Exactly. Just because people introduce *additional* reasons to impeach doesn’t mean the earlier ones don’t count.

I think you can get half or more of the GOP to impeach for "Russian agent". I don't think you can get any with "enrages the Democrats".

At the moment you have the later but not the former. Worse, I think that's what you'll lead with.

Not really? I mean the field was plenty full after it was done but Jeb! did really cripple a lot of the other candidates in the establishment lane with him.

I'm pretty sure this is broadly accurate. Although the DUP goes beyond not much liking Labour right now, they with some justification view Corbyn as an IRA sympathizer so Labour under him is completely toxic to them.

If there was some sort of consensus that the best thing to do was to jetison the Northern Irish, that could be done. As the current imbroglio is due to their being absolutely no consensus for anything in the UK right now, its not a practical threat. A move from the Tories that screws over the Irish Protestants results in their government falling and then rampaging chaos across the land

She was given many dozens of millions of dollars, FAR past sanity for a wild idea and technology that didn't work. If gender played a role then the problem was that she was given far too much rope, not too little.

In theory she should have failed at this much earlier and then gone on to try again. It's too late after she's done things like burn Billions of dollars by misstating the profitability of her company by a factor of 1000x and the accuracy of her technology by a similar amount.

It's very easy to paint her as a con-woman and put a big villain hat on her. Another possibility is she started this at the age of 19-20 and painted herself into a corner.

Reading her wiki I can't tell how much of what I'm reading is "genius go-getter" and how much is "lying/spin". Did she really start her first business selling C++ compilers to Chinese universities as a high schooler, or did she simply claim that?

Similarly "In 2001, Holmes applied to Stanford University and studied chemical engineering, working in a lab with Ph.D. candidates and Channing Robertson, dean at the School of Engineering.[14]

What does "working in a lab" mean in this context? Washing glassware? She would have been a freshman or sophomore.

Theranos ultimately failed because it didn't have the technology to do the impossible and their founder doesn't seem to have realized what was feasible. With the benefits of hindsight, she did NOT drop out of school to found Theranos because she had vast technological insights. Another reason to drop out is Chem Eng is really hard and she wasn't up to it.

Translation: He's a scumbag, and his scumbag crew committed crimes.

That's not impeachable. Worse, it probably shouldn't be.

What you need is something that would convince Dems to remove someone like Clinton.

My general impression is not only do you not have that but after we subtract histeria you're not even close. The original impeachable claim is he's a Russian agent. That's a great reason.

However there seems to have been a pivot from "Is he a Russian agent?" to "he's Trump, how do we resist/remove him?".

HOLY CRAP KARL LAGERFELD HAS DIED

People will see pictures on television screens and think that Bernie grew a ponytail and started wearing sunglasses like Roy Orbison.

Poor Amy. She's the most boring and, as such, the most electable... but the invisible primary has to happen before we get to the visible one.

I agree but see it more as a gradual privatizing of what should be public.

I think framing the choice of schools as one of virtue (public) versus selfish (private) accepts an assumption that should be refuted.

Namely, that public school is somehow always an inferior good. Why can't we accept the idea that public schools can be, and should be, every bit as good as their private model?

I connect it to the same dichotomy we see in medicine and infrastructure like water.

We see advertisements for miraculous medical treatments with all sorts of fancy concierge service, and advertisements for luxury water, alongside the stark fact that for some people, just any sort of medical care at all or potable water at all, is inaccessible.

And these things appear to be related.

I think the argument should be about how to make clean potable water, efficient medical care, and high quality schooling universally accessible to where parents don't need to make agonizing choices.

It's all about thriving. Even in really good school districts, where parents have considerable voice, if a kid is not thriving in that school, and the parents can not get the environment to change such that they can, the kid should be pulled and placed somewhere else. Not every kid thrives in the PS environment, regardless of how good or bad any given school is.

On that note:

If Bernie Sanders announces for president, and no one hears it... The Sanders announcement not rating as a lead story on CNN/MSNBC.— Josh Kraushaar (@HotlineJosh) February 19, 2019

The narrative coalesces.

Well sure but there's no "performance" at this stage. Just a bunch of phone surveyors asking people (most of whom don't think of politics at all this time or most times of the year) who they like. Name recognition is everything at this stage of the game and at this stage of the game all that'll get him is money and the ability to move on to the next stage of the game.

To be fair, that's all you need at this stage of the game too of course.