So, for like the nineteenth time, does anybody have any factual information speaking to whether it is actually legitimate to accuse Beto of being “in the pocket of Big Oil”?
Open Secrets doesn’t list any petroleum business as a significant donator for his Senate campaign.
I just offered you some, which you are ignoring. Of course, if the implication is that he is operating under deep cover, that’s basically unfalsifiable. :rolleyes:
And yes: Beto does not accept PAC money.
Thanks! That site is a bit baffling to navigate, but it appears that he has not received any significant funding from oil industry PACs. I declare him pure.
He must shave his head and wash his clothes, and after sundown he may return to the camp. (Biblical humor)
Well, you offered some inspiring quotes, but talk is cheap. I’m much more interested in following the money. The LCV rating was useful information, but although I generally have a positive impression of that organization, I have no idea how they calculate their ratings, so that was only marginally useful to me.
You were the one that brought this up. People have provided info that sez No, now you are asking for proof he didnt? :dubious:
No, you were the one who brought it up. You accused unnamed pro-Bernie parties of “claiming that Beto is in the pocket of Big Oil”, and that was how this whole sidetrack got started. And unless I missed it, at the time I posted what you quote, nobody had in fact offered any useful information as to whether that accusation was true. Unless maybe you count cites that he says global warming is bad as useful information, which I don’t.
Anyway, I assume this whole conversation is now beside the point for you. You’ve surely ruled out voting for Beto now that you know he has voluntarily hobbled himself by rejecting PAC donations, right?
No, I did not.
You did:
Thing Fish
How much money has Beto taken from oil companies? (Serious question, I have no idea). If it’s a nontrivial amount, that’s a legitimate criticism, regardless of what he might “constantly talk” about.
Which was a response to…uh, Slacker, not you. :smack: Apologies.
You would have to have your head in the sand not to see what’s happening. I can’t recall of a time one of the two parties has been in such public disarray. It would be one thing if this were strictly a battle over issues.
Black Caucus Member William Lacy Clay Says Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Playing the Race Card in Pelosi Fight
? Different groups within a political party disagreeing with each other is “public disarray”? Maybe I’m just older than you, but I can remember lots of times in the past when such things happened.
I think the relatively recent Republican clampdown on internal dissent is skewing our standards for what counts as normal party factionalism.
Maybe so, but we’re talking about polarization along demographic lines, which is different and potentially much more toxic than what we observed with the Tea Party and Freedom Caucus wars against the Establishment. Race and identity are potentially divisive wedge issues. It’s fine if AOC wants to confront Pelosi on whether she’s doing enough for the progressive cause, and I’d say that even her challenging Pelosi on issues like border funding are okay up to a point. But Ocasio-Cortez is just flaming now, and it’s not helping anyone. My sense is that AOC views Pelosi as another Joe Crowley, another old timer establishment figure whom she can dispose of. Nancy Pelosi ain’t Joe Crowley, but even if she is, what good does AOC accomplish if she’s weakening the Speaker? What good is it if an angry AOC becomes the face of the Democratic party in places where people are much less committed to voting Democrat? She needs to stop talking shit. She needs to realize most districts around the country aren’t in the Bronx.
The Democratic party is strong enough to have intense discussions about strategy, but once we start saying that the party is being ruled by old white hags and closet bigots, then we’re in real trouble. I am extremely progressive, pro-immigrant, married to an immigrant, pro-Black, pro-Latino/Latina, pro-LGBT, pro-Jew, pro-Muslim, pro-Christian, pro-Atheist, pro-Whatever…and I can tell you that if this is the direction the party goes in, I’ll still show up to vote against Trump but not necessarily with enthusiasm. And it wouldn’t surprise me if others with less enthusiasm simply don’t show up to vote at all. If that happens, then it’s four, or eight, or 12 more years of Trump.
Factional warfare is different in the social media era. The combination of speed, accessibility to publish, reach, and demand for purity are new. This is a very exploitable schism and I’ll be surprised if Putin and other foreign leaders don’t.
Except if a Congressional Black Caucus member is calling out younger more left-wing Congresspersons of color, then that’s not really a division along racial-identity lines. It’s basically about younger radicals versus the older establishment, same as it ever was. (AFAICT, btw, a majority of Ocasio-Cortez fans among voters are white people.) See also: Nader supporters and the “Billionaires for Bush (or Gore)” protestors, “Sanders socialists” versus establishment Dems, etc.
I kind of wonder whether the current knicker-twisting about exceptional levels of Democratic “disarray” isn’t due in part to the unprecedented fact that the main figures now occupying the controversy stage happen to be mostly women. We’re culturally conditioned to view acrimonious disputes between men as part of normal partisanship and competition, while acrimonious disputes between women connote “hysteria”, “catfighting”, all sorts of irrational instability. Men in particular tend to be embarrassed by the idea of being associated with, or in any way subordinate to, quarreling women.
Pelosi’s certainly doing her best to dampen the interest, let alone enthusiasm, of prospective Dem voters.
I think the older member of the CBC recognizes that AOC really has no place to be using a race card as a way to crank up the pressure on Pelosi. There definitely is an element of old guard vs new guard, but AOC called out the Speaker of the House by implying that she’s allowing bias to color her relationships with new members of Congress. It’s no different than Kamala Harris’ “That little girl was me” attacks on Joe Biden. They can backtrack and say “I wasn’t bringing race into it, I wasn’t saying he’s a racist” all they want, but…they brought race into it, and it has real consequences. In Biden’s case, it brought him down anywhere from 4-8% in the polls and made him look like a much more vulnerable front runner. In the case of the Pelosi-AOC spat, it makes the Democratic party look like a less attractive alternative to the Republican party. If independents and centrists are repulsed by the Republican party’s politics of race, I don’t think they’re going to find the Democratic party more appealing if some of its most visible members are calling out senior leadership by implying they’re closet bigots or by having their staff wearing tee shirts suggesting that their more moderate colleagues are Nazi collaborators.
The fact that they’re women really has nothing to do with it. I think a real source of tension is that the energy that fueled the rise of Bernie Sanders’ campaign, and many of the same people who were involved in it, have stubbornly refused to accept their role in getting Donald Trump elected, and many of them have moved on to participate in other campaigns. In fact AOC’s chief of staff is a former Bernie Bro himself. Having passion for progressive causes is okay, but not when the effort includes having people like Mark Pocan call colleagues child abusers, having AOC suggest that Pelosi’s singling out women of color, and having her chief of state throw incendiary attacks at her critics. It’s not good energy at all, and has nothing to do with the fact that we’re watching women get into ‘cat fights’
That’s a weird thing to say. You realize there’s no Puerto Ricans in the Congressional Black Caucus?
I’ve been largely impressed by AOC’s ability to articulate her positions, the fire and energy she brings, and her rationale for picking the fights she picks. That being said, her feud with Pelosi has been eroding my opinion of her by degrees. AOC’s “women of color” jab at Pelosi was plainly unwarranted, and her attempts to spin herself out of it haven’t been particularly convincing. I can excuse a certain amount of political naivete that comes with youth and passion, but I have no respect for this thinly veiled public accusation of racism. I think she and her staff are certainly living up to the sentiment in the OP.
AOC and her little gang of four can fuck right off. :mad: This has nothing to do with race—I despise Bernie for his attacks on the party, and I felt the same way about Lieberman BTW—except that AOC has now despicably played the race card, like Clarence Thomas did with his “high tech lynching of an uppity Negro” comment. And she tries to pretend she’s not doing it. GMAFB :rolleyes: