And the 2016 Ralph Nader Award Goes to Bernie Sanders - Time.com

[JCanete]

19. That article is full-on love fest for Bill's campaigning and policies when in office. I'm sorry but

hard-lines on crime are almost always a means of turning our attention to focusing on policing " the bad guys" and incarceration rather than looking at policies that actually address the causes of crime. That sort of language is pandering to the masses rather than lifting them and their ideals up, and it is pandering to the policing and punishment lobbies. No surprise that our prisons and the industries that feed on incarceration only got more and more bloated through the nineties and beyond. It is not a proud thing to be number one in total and per-capita prisoners in the world.

The purist label consistently misses the mark. I am fine with people who have differing opinions on policy. If the one disagreement we have is that money doesn't actually influence politics when it's the Democrats that get cozy with it, that's just too damn fundamental. Nothing gets fixed if you ignore the elephant in the room. It only gets worse...because whether we pretend its there or not, that elephant likes to fucking eat.

That is why I will never disavow a third party candidate who campaigns on principles I agree with, even if that candidate might negatively impact the Democratic candidate's chances.(doesn't mean I'll vote for that candidate;'I've never done so up to this point) If those voices weren't there, I'm not comfortable with what our democratic party might look like today. I'm not a whole lot more confident that we would have won more elections anyway, because being moderate is not a winning formula when it comes to getting the big-money to support you all the way into office, though it will absolutely garner you support when it comes to running against far more liberal candidates in the primaries.

Why would Clinton need to recenter in the fall...because of changes to economic policy? What is this article saying here? No Joe-publics voted for Trump because she was offering free college or talking about how prisons shouldn't be privatized. If the writer's point is that she was pushed left as in, to champion minority causes, well I would love to see where DU members stand on that. If that was a strategic error only born out of her need to compete with Sanders on the left while continuing to avoid taking the fight to the big money, well why didn't she just do that? If on the other hand, it was the right thing to do, then why, if this article is to be believed, she only did it as a response to Sanders, and if so...where's the credit on that one? heh.

The thing that should never be overlooked when reading articles like this is the presumptions that are in the language. What is "extreme flank" about wanting money to be taken out of the political process? Of course, to Time Magazine that is extreme, because Time is a pillar of the establishment. Thus, claims of extreme are stated simply as "fact," without any irony or self- reflection.