[Donna]

However, the easiest way might be to hold multi-party democratic elections in Cuba.

In other words, the neoliberal looting of the commons.

[Finfinder]

Your chance to convince the Cuban people that America cared about Spanish Caribbean people was Puerto Rico Fin. Donald failed the Puerto Rican people, He even floated the idea of not giving them their Hurricane Relief funds to redirect it to the wall. If another Hurricane had come last year? Thousands upon thousands of Puerto Ricans would have lost their lives again without even a tent cloth roof to come back home to. There is earthquake damage now too. Where is the reconstruction efforts? Has Trump dealt with aging infrastructure in Puerto Rico. He blames the local politicians. But Fin? The local conservative was ousted by a million and a half Puerto Ricans. Even Jennifer Gonzalez turned her back on that Rossello pro statehood boot-licker.

If you wanted to convince the Cubans that America is about prosperity and good jobs, and education, and clean drinking water and electricity and all that? Should have made sure the Maria thing went well. Should have made sure you did not have all those factories and pharmaceutical industries and all those jobs pull out for cheaper wage nations. But the reality is that America doesn't give a SHIT about Puerto Rico. It is a coaling station and a meaningless colony they sell expensive shit from the states to. Not a country they respect at all.

So they showed their true colors to Havana and the dead Cuban bearded administration that if they went FULL YANKEE and let the Americans in? They would not be doing well at all. And that in fact NOT TRUSTING the Americans is the best thing they could have done.

Because the Mexicans here in the Yucatan know the Cubans well. THOUSANDS OF THEM WORK and live here. And all of them are extremely well educated. They speak Spanish, English, French, Russian, etc. They are doctors, lawyers, engineers in Mexico.

I see them everywhere in sports, in the arts, in the sciences in the teaching professions, medical professions here....they work here save money and go back home to Havana and they are very very interesting.


They are not convinced the Yankees care about them either. IF you wanted to convince the Cubans to let the USA influence their societies? Should have done a good job in Puerto Rico. You sucked in Puerto Rico. So? Whatever credibility you might have gained by dominating a Spanish speaking sister island (and we know the Cubans very well in San Juan), is WASTED.

Go lick your wounds and get the hell out of the way Fin! No one cares about the American gov't official Donald Pig Opinion on the Latinos in the Caribbean.

There are a whole lot of Puerto Ricans in Florida. My cousin who lives in Plant City is one of them. She won't vote for Trump. She is a very dedicated Protestant Christian. She works with a clinic for helping Guatemalan farm workers in Florida. She doesn't see the Guatemalans as an infestation of vermin like Trump does. She sees him throwing paper towels at her people and acting like a racist fool.

Backing bankers over people. She and many other Boricuas are big numbers in Florida. They will cancel out that exile conservative element. The first exile people in the sixties are old. The newer generations are more progressive even the younger ones. They want to go to Cuba and visit family, they want to go and bring money for car parts, and needed things....they are united. The Cubans, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans are hardcore pro family unity folk. NO WAY POLITICS get in the way of family love. No way.

So? Go and have fantasies about Florida. The Boricuas can vote. They are young. They came from Puerto Rico and are not happy not being able to live in the island and having to be in Florida in rented houses.

Trump is not their friend. Let us see what the Boricuas do in Florida.

The chance to convince how humanitarian you Yankee Gov't folks are has PASSED! YOU SUCKED! Pay the price!

As I always appreciate your well thought out replies. I have personal understanding that you can't convince Cubans they all blindly approve of Peurto Ricans. You can't convince me that all Latinos blindly respect each other because they share the same language. I understand well from my Cuban girlfriend there is a great rift between Cubans and Puerto Ricans and Mexicans so I know different then these blind identity political arguments. There is a class society in Cuba just like any other country. I honestly feel bad for what happened in PR I'm very confused about the massive corruption that prevents forward progress in PR. Its not lost that PR is an Island with limited natural resources and the ability to produce revenue to support the large population. Not to mention it's located in the in the middle of hurricane alley prone to these natural disaster. I support PR's Independence and I support Puero Ricans wishing to have opportunity here in the US that unfortunately they cannot get with the limitations of living on that island. (Please don't make this personal I was at the benefit concert for PR in Miami.)

Cubans especially those that have immigrated here from the oppression of Castro's tyranny are hugely sensitive to these stupid comments about support for Castro and communist regimes. Look up the comments by Ozzie Gian baseball manager of the Miami Marlins (from Venezuela) and his comments about Castro. Major protests in Miami and he ended up getting suspended by the team for 5 games. Later he stated those were the worst comments of his life time.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/11/spor ... astro.html

[late]

The best thing about Bernie supporters and his candidacy is how it "outs" how completely dishonest and hypocritical his followers are.

Project much?

Trump was a sexual predator. The way he doesn't take care of himself, I doubt the plumbing works now. While he talked about sexual assault on the Access Hollywood tape, he did all sorts of regrettable things. He walked into a teen beauty pageant dressing room when he knew most would be undressed. His first wife says he raped her, and there's lots more where those came from.

The article Sanders wrote a half century ago takes on questions about gender norms and common fantasies.

So what.

That's one of the sillier attempts at Whataboutism I've seen.

[Donna]

The Cuba Lobby

The most powerful lobby in Washington isn't the NRA. It's the Castro-hating right wing that has Obama's bureaucrats terrified and inert.

BY WILLIAM M. LEOGRANDE | APRIL 12, 2013, 12:23 AM

ay-Z and Beyoncé are discovering that fame provides no immunity from the Cuba Lobby’s animus for anyone who has the audacity to act as if Cuba is a normal country rather than the heart of darkness. After the pop icons’ recent trip to the island to celebrate their wedding anniversary, the Cuba Lobby’s congressional contingent — Sen. Marco Rubio, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart — castigated the couple, demanding that they be investigated for violating the half-century-old U.S. embargo. (As it turned out, the trip had been authorized by the U.S. Treasury Department as a cultural exchange.) Still, celebrity trips to Cuba make headlines, and condemnation by the Cuba Lobby is always quick to follow. But what seems like a Hollywood sideshow is actually symptomatic of a much deeper and more dangerous problem — a problem very much like the one that afflicted U.S. policy toward China in the 1950s and 1960s. Then, as now, an aggressive foreign-policy lobby was able to prevent rational debate about an anachronistic policy by intimidating anyone who dared challenge it.

"A wasteland." That’s how W. Averell Harriman described the State Department’s Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs when he took it over for President John F. Kennedy in 1961. "It’s a disaster area filled with human wreckage.… Some of them are so beaten down they can’t be saved. Some of those you would want to save are just finished. They try and write a report and nothing comes out. It’s a terrible thing." As David Halberstam recounts in The Best and the Brightest, the destruction of the State Department’s expertise on Asia was the result of the China Lobby’s decade-long assault on everyone, from professors to Foreign Service officers, who disputed the charge that communist sympathizers in the United States had "lost China." The China Lobby and its allies in Congress forced President Harry Truman and President Dwight Eisenhower to purge the State Department of its most senior and knowledgeable "China hands," while continuing to perpetuate the fiction that the Nationalist government in Taiwan was the "real" China, rather than the communist government on the mainland — a policy stance that persisted long after the rest of the world had come to terms with Mao Zedong’s victory. The result was a department that had little real knowledge about Asia and was terrified of straying from far-right orthodoxy. This state of affairs contributed directly to the debacle of Vietnam.

Today, U.S. relations with Latin America are suffering from an equally irrational policy toward Cuba — a policy designed in the 1960s to overthrow Fidel Castro’s government and which, more than 50 years later, is no closer to success. Like U.S. policy toward China in the 1950s and 1960s, policy toward Cuba is frozen in place by a domestic political lobby, this one with roots in the electorally pivotal state of Florida. The Cuba Lobby combines the carrot of political money with the stick of political denunciation to keep wavering Congress members, government bureaucrats, and even presidents in line behind a policy that, as President Barack Obama himself admits, has failed for half a century and is supported by virtually no other countries. (The last time it came to a vote in the U.N. General Assembly, only Israel and the Pacific island of Palau sided with the United States.) Of course, the news at this point is not that a Cuba Lobby exists, but that it astonishingly lives on — even during the presidency of Obama, who publicly vowed to pursue a new approach to Cuba, but whose policy has been stymied thus far.

Like the China Lobby, the Cuba Lobby isn’t one organization but a loose-knit conglomerate of exiles, sympathetic members of Congress, and nongovernmental organizations, some of which comprise a self-interested industry nourished by the flow of "democracy promotion" money from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). And like its Sino-obsessed predecessor, the Cuba Lobby was launched at the instigation of conservative Republicans in government who needed outside backers to advance their partisan policy aims. In the 1950s, they were Republican members of Congress battling New Dealers in the Truman administration over Asia policy. In the 1980s, they were officials in Ronald Reagan’s administration battling congressional Democrats over Central America policy.

At the Cuba Lobby’s request, Reagan created Radio Martí, modeled on Radio Free Europe, to broadcast propaganda to Cuba. He named Jorge Mas Canosa, founder of the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), to chair the radio’s oversight board. President George H.W. Bush followed with TV Martí. Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) authored the 1996 Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act, writing the economic embargo into law so no president could change it without congressional approval.

Founded at the suggestion of Richard V. Allen, Reagan’s first national security advisor, CANF became one of the most powerful ethnic foreign-policy organizations in the United States and was the linchpin of the Cuba Lobby until Mas Canosa’s death in 1997. "No individual had more influence over United States policies toward Cuba over the past two decades than Jorge Mas Canosa," the New York Times editorialized. In Washington, CANF built its reputation by spreading campaign contributions to bolster friends and punish enemies. In 1988, CANF money helped Joe Lieberman defeat incumbent Sen. Lowell Weicker, whom Lieberman accused of being soft on Castro because he visited Cuba and advocated better relations. Weicker’s defeat sent a chilling message to other members of Congress: challenge the Cuba Lobby at your peril. In 1992, according to Peter Stone’s reporting in National Journal, New Jersey Democrat Sen. Robert Torricelli, seduced by the Cuba Lobby’s political money, reversed his position on Havana and wrote the Cuban Democracy Act, tightening the embargo. Today, the political action arm of the Cuba Lobby is the U.S.-Cuba Democracy PAC, which hands out more campaign dollars than CANF’s political action arm did even at its height — more than $3 million in the last five national elections.

In Miami, conservative Cuban-Americans have long presumed to be the sole authentic voice o
f the community, silencing dissent by threats and, occasionally, violence. In the 1970s, anti-Castro terrorist groups like Omega 7 and Alpha 66 set off dozens of bombs in Miami and assassinated two Cuban-Americans who advocated dialogue with Castro. Reports by Human Rights Watch in the 1990s documented the climate of fear in Miami and the role that elements of the Cuba Lobby, including CANF, played in creating it.

Today, moderate Cuban-Americans have managed to carve out greater space for political debate about U.S. relations with Cuba as attitudes in the community have changed — a result of both the passing of the old exile generation of the 1960s and the arrival of new immigrants who want to maintain ties with family they left behind. But a network of right-wing radio stations and right-wing bloggers still routinely vilifies moderates by name, branding anyone who favors dialogue as a spy for Castro. The modus operandi is the same as the China Lobby’s in the 1950s: One anti-Castro crusader makes dubious accusations of espionage, often based on guilt by association, which the others then repeat ad nauseam, citing one other as proof.

Like the China Lobby before it, the Cuba Lobby has also struck fear into the heart of the foreign-policy bureaucracy. The congressional wing of the Cuba Lobby, in concert with its friends in the executive branch, routinely punishes career civil servants who don’t toe the line. One of the Cuba Lobby’s early targets was John J. "Jay" Taylor, chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, who was given an unsatisfactory annual evaluation report in 1988 by Republican stalwart Elliott Abrams, then assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, because Taylor reported from Havana that the Cubans were serious about wanting to negotiate peace in southern Africa and Central America. "CANF had close contact with the Cuban desk, which soon turned notably unfriendly toward my reporting from post and it seemed toward me personally," Taylor recalled in an oral history interview. "Mas and the foundation soon assumed that I was too soft on Castro."

The risks of crossing the Cuba Lobby were not lost on other foreign-policy professionals. In 1990, Taylor was in Washington to consult about the newly launched TV Martí, which the Cuban government was jamming so completely that Cubans on the island dubbed it, "la TV que no se ve" ("No-see TV"). But TV Martí’s patrons in Washington blindly insisted that the vast majority of the Cuban population was watching the broadcasts. Taylor invited the U.S. Information Agency officials responsible for TV Martí to come to Cuba to see for themselves. "Silence prevailed around the table," he recalled. "I don’t think anyone there really believed TV Martí signals were being received in Cuba. It was a Kafkaesque moment, a true Orwellian experience, to see a room full of grown, educated men and women so afraid for their jobs or their political positions that they could take part in such a charade."

In 1993, the Cuba Lobby opposed the appointment of President Bill Clinton’s first choice to be assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, Mario Baeza, because he had once visited Cuba. According to Stone, fearful of the Cuba Lobby’s political clout, Clinton dumped Baeza. Two years later, Clinton caved in to the Cuba Lobby’s demand that he fire National Security Council official Morton Halperin, who was the architect of the successful 1995 migration accord with Cuba that created a safe, legal route for Cubans to emigrate to the United States. One chief of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Cuba told me he stopped sending sensitive cables to the State Department altogether because they so often leaked to Cuba Lobby supporters in Congress. Instead, the diplomat flew to Miami so he could report to the department by telephone.

During George W. Bush’s administration, the Cuba Lobby completely captured the State Department’s Latin America bureau (renamed the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs). Bush’s first assistant secretary was Otto Reich, a Cuban-American veteran of the Reagan administration and favorite of Miami hard-liners. Reich had run Reagan’s "public diplomacy" operation demonizing opponents of the president’s Central America policy as communist sympathizers. Reich hired as his deputy Dan Fisk, former staff assistant to Senator Helms and author of the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act. Reich was followed by Roger Noriega, another former Helms staffer, who explained that Bush’s policy was aimed at destabilizing the Cuban regime: "We opted for change even if it meant chaos. The Cubans had had too much stability over decades.… Chaos was necessary in order to change reality."

In 2002, Bush’s undersecretary for arms control and international security, John Bolton, made the dubious charge that Cuba was developing biological weapons. When the national intelligence officer for Latin America, Fulton Armstrong, (along with other intelligence community analysts) objected to this mischaracterization of the community’s assessment, Bolton and Reich tried repeatedly to have him fired. The Cuba Lobby began a steady drumbeat of charges that Armstrong was a Cuban agent because his and the community’s analysis disputed the Bush team’s insistence that the Castro regime was fragile and wouldn’t survive the passing of its founder. The 2001 arrest for espionage of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s top Cuba analyst, Ana Montes, heightened the Cuba Lobby’s hysteria over traitors in government in the same way that the spy cases of the 1950s — Alger Hiss and the Amerasia magazine affair — gave the China Lobby ammunition. Armstrong was subjected to repeated and intrusive security investigations, all of which cleared him of wrongdoing. (He completed a four-year term as national intelligence officer and received a prestigious CIA medal recognizing his service when he left the agency in 2008.)

When Obama was elected president, promising a "new beginning" in relations with Havana, the Cuba Lobby relied on its congressional wing to stop him. Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), the senior Cuban-American Democrat in Congress and now chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, vehemently opposes any opening to Cuba. In March 2009, he signaled his willingness to defy both his president and his party to get his way. Menendez voted with Republicans to block passage of a $410 billion omnibus appropriations bill (needed to keep the government running) because it relaxed the requirement that Cuba pay in advance for food purchases from U.S. suppliers and eased restrictions on travel to th
e island. To get Menendez to relent, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner had to promise in writing that the administration would consult Menendez on any change in U.S. policy toward Cuba.

Senate Republicans also blocked confirmation of Arturo Valenzuela as Obama’s assistant secretary for Western Hemisphere affairs until November 2009. With the bureau managed in the interim by Bush holdovers, no one was pushing from below to carry out Obama’s new Cuba policy. After Valenzuela stepped down in 2012, Senator Rubio (R-Fla.), whose father left Cuba in the 1950s, held up confirmation of Valenzuela’s replacement, Roberta Jacobson, until the administration agreed to tighten restrictions on educational travel to Cuba, undercutting Obama’s stated policy of increasing people-to-people engagement.

When Obama nominated career Foreign Service officer Jonathan Farrar to be ambassador to Nicaragua, the Cuba Lobby denounced him as soft on communism. During his previous posting as chief of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Havana, Farrar had reported to Washington that Cuba’s traditional dissident movement had very little appeal to ordinary Cubans. Menendez and Rubio teamed up to give Farrar a verbal beating during his confirmation hearing for carrying out Obama’s policy of engaging the Cuban government rather than simply antagonizing it. When they blocked Farrar’s confirmation, Obama withdrew the nomination, sending Farrar as ambassador to Panama instead. Their point made, Menendez and Rubio did not object.

The Cuba Lobby’s power to derail diplomatic careers is common knowledge among foreign-policy professionals. Throughout Obama’s first term, midlevel State Department officials cooperated more closely and deferred more slavishly to congressional opponents of Obama’s Cuba policy than to supporters like John Kerry, the new secretary of state who served at the time as Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman. When Senator Kerry tried to get the State Department and USAID to reform the Bush administration’s democracy-promotion programs in 2010, he ran into more opposition from the bureaucracy than from Republicans. If Obama intends to finally keep the 2008 campaign promise to take a new direction in relations with Cuba, the job can’t be left to foreign-policy bureaucrats, who are so terrified of the Cuba Lobby that they continue to believe, or pretend to believe, absurdities — that Cubans are watching TV Martí, for instance, or that Cuba is a state sponsor of terrorism. Only a determined president and a tough secretary of state can drive a new policy through a bureaucratic wasteland so paralyzed by fear and inertia.

The irrationality of U.S. policy does not stem just from concerns about electoral politics in Florida. The Cuban-American community has evolved to the point that a majority now favors engagement with Cuba, as both opinion polls and Obama’s electoral success in 2008 and 2012 demonstrate. Today, the larger problem is the climate of fear in the government bureaucracy, where even honest reporting about Cuba — let alone advocating a more sensible policy — can endanger one’s career. Democratic presidents, who ought to know better, have tolerated this distortion of the policy process and at times have reinforced it by allowing the Cuba lobby to extort concessions from them. But the cost is high — the gradual and insidious erosion of the government’s ability to make sound policy based on fact rather than fantasy.

Through bullying and character assassination, the China Lobby blocked a sensible U.S. policy toward Beijing for a quarter-century, with tragic results. When Richard Nixon finally defied the China Lobby by going to Beijing in 1972, the earth did not tremble, civilization did not collapse, and U.S. security did not suffer. If anything, U.S. allies around the world applauded the adoption — finally — of a rational policy. At home, the punditocracy was surprised to discover that Nixon’s bold stroke was politically popular. The China Lobby proved to be a paper tiger; the Red Scare fever of the 1950s had subsided, robbing the movement of its political base.

Likewise, the Cuba Lobby has blocked a sensible policy toward Cuba for half a century, with growing damage to U.S. relations with Latin America. When a courageous U.S. president finally decides to defy the Cuba Lobby with a stroke as bold as Nixon’s trip to China, she or he will discover that so too the Cuba Lobby no longer has the political clout it once had. The strategic importance of repairing the United States’ frayed relations with Latin America has come to outweigh the political risk of reconciliation with Havana. Nixon went to China, and history records it as the highlight of his checkered legacy. Will Barack Obama have the courage to go to Havana?

[late]

Cuba lobby

Thank you.

There is just too much crazy for me to cover it all.

The corrupt and brutal Cubans that got kicked out of Cuba have been throwing money at politicians for over a half century. They haven't changed, they want us us to send in the army so they can go back to the way things were.

Which was worse than Castro.

[JohnRawls]

Thank you.

There is just too much crazy for me to cover it all.

The corrupt and brutal Cubans that got kicked out of Cuba have been throwing money at politicians for over a half century. They haven't changed, they want us us to send in the army so they can go back to the way things were.

Which was worse than Castro.

Cuba is not as bad or good as people like to pretend. The better question that people should start asking themselves is how to improve the lives on the people in Cuba.

[late]

Cuba is not as bad or good as people like to pretend. The better question that people should start asking themselves is how to improve the lives on the people in Cuba.

That's a very good point, and one I discussed earlier.

We should have built a working relationship with Cuba the way we did with China.

[Hindsite]

Project much?

Trump was a sexual predator. The way he doesn't take care of himself, I doubt the plumbing works now. While he talked about sexual assault on the Access Hollywood tape, he did all sorts of regrettable things. He walked into a teen beauty pageant dressing room when he knew most would be undressed. His first wife says he raped her, and there's lots more where those came from.

You left out the fact that his first wife later disavowed her rape charge she used in an attempt to get a more favorable divorce settlement.

Donald Trump's Ex-Wife Ivana Disavows Old 'Rape' Allegation

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donald- ... d=32732204

[JohnRawls]

That's a very good point, and one I discussed earlier in the thread.

Well, i doubt we will agree what those steps are though. (I didn't read what you posted in this regard)

Cuba needs to fix its relationship with the US and move a bit more in direction of Capitalism/Liberalism to become better. It doesn't have to capitulate nor is there a need for a coup. The main purpose of this would be how to transform the current Cuban economy to a proper capitalist economy while keeping things like free healthcare, free education etc. Hard to say if it is possible for Cuba to do on its own.

[Donna]

Thank you.

There is just too much crazy for me to cover it all.

The corrupt and brutal Cubans that got kicked out of Cuba have been throwing money at politicians for over a half century. They haven't changed, they want us us to send in the army so they can go back to the way things were.

Which was worse than Castro.

Let's not forget that fascist terrorist organizations created by exiles, like Alpha 66, are still in existence. Had the Bay of Pigs succeeded they would have undoubtedly seized power and disenfranchised the entire Afro-Cuban population (probably under Antonio Veciana, who worked for both the CIA and sugar-magnate Julio Lobo).

[late]

You left out the fact that his first wife later disavowed her rape charge she used in an attempt to get a more favorable divorce settlement.

David Cay Johnston's biography of Trump argues that the allegation was real, and the retraction was not.

Trump was in a lot of pain at the time, and lashing out is his style.

[Tainari88]

...because the communist economy of Cuba sucks.

Anyway, I think I'll vote for Sanders in the California primary since I'm not registered as a Republican.

Lol. You must really dislike liberals BJ. Especially corporate globalist liberals.


Why not register for the Republican party? I think I know why......?


You are confident that the Left in the USA by removing the liberal element will fall and then the far right finally can right things and do a nationalist agenda?

They will fail because capitalism is addicted to using the entire world of many other nations to further their demise.

You should know about the dialectic and the opposites I covered by now BJ. The capitalist class killed the nationalists.

The only response now is for the international socialists with the entire force of organized working class people in many nations....hundreds of nations. That is the only logical response to that tentacle stuff.

No one is going to be able to clean up the messiness of humanity and its diversity and constant flows...not with modern technology, flights and so on....it is over BJ.

The world has shifted out of that paradigm.

Your agenda if not in the next 20 years it will fall to an internationalist organization. That is what the globalists forced. They are a callous eploitative and class based class.....so they will force an international class based war. How long it will take? Who knows.

But the nationalist penned in response has been check mated BJ. If not this decade in the next one for sure. It is the way the ball bounces with the development of greed to its maximum expression....with the American Civil War they wanted the plantation slave labor out to dominate and pay wage labor and not have to deal with keeping the slaves...the feudal system died. This is the next evolution BJ.

You are going to have to accept it.

[Rancid]

internationalist organization

Amen to that.

Let the free market ring!!!

[Hindsite]

Why is Bernie Sanders even running for president as a Democrat after having been screwed by the DNC in 2016? Why not run as an open communist and publicly present your views openly and honestly to the American people?

I think it is payback time to the DNC.

[late]

I think it is payback time to the DNC.

Somehow you have blindly lurched into the general vicinity of the truth.

Just about everybody will attack Bernie tonite.

Same thing happened to Liz Warren. Because she's a Progressive, the Establishment had everyone (on their team) go after her. Same thing happens to Sanders now.

Problem is, a lot of people will stay home if they smell a dirty trick being played.

The electorate is deeply polarised, and split a dozen different ways on both sides of the fence. So it doesn't matter, Trump, Biden, Warren, Pete. A lot of people will stay home.

But this is especially true for Bernie supporters. They were screwed before.

They won't appreciate being screwed again.

[Finfinder]

Project much?

Trump was a sexual predator. The way he doesn't take care of himself, I doubt the plumbing works now. While he talked about sexual assault on the Access Hollywood tape, he did all sorts of regrettable things. He walked into a teen beauty pageant dressing room when he knew most would be undressed. His first wife says he raped her, and there's lots more where those came from.

The article Sanders wrote a half century ago takes on questions about gender norms and common fantasies.

So what.

That's one of the sillier attempts at Whataboutism I've seen.

We will revisit your attempts at whataboutism when Trump chooses his next supreme court justice.

It's like shooting a fish in a barrel with you.

The best thing about Bernie supporters and his candidacy is how it "outs" how completely dishonest and hypocritical his followers are. I'ts like you all think everyone forgot what you posted 15 minutes ago LOL"

[Tainari88]

Well, I've been to Tulum. However, that's not Latino. I haven't studied the history extensively. I've only been to Mexico, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Brazil, and crossed the borders of Paraguay and Argentina near Foz do Iguacu. So I cannot claim to be an expert.


Oh, no doubt. However, the easiest way might be to hold multi-party democratic elections in Cuba.

Do you think Bernie Sanders would cut Puerto Rico loose? I don't think so. The welfare state depends on the Insular Decisions; otherwise, the US federal constitution is very limited.

No, BJ, it is very different growing up speaking Spanish and being a part of a Latin American community where you see them as equal to you in everything.

The issue I have with you BJ, is that you don't believe in equality. You won't accept a lot of concepts that have to do with class wars.

You never will.

I don't know what Bernie will do ultimately with Puerto Rico if he gets to be president. But I sure do like who he called up to consult on it. Lol. I will keep that a secret. Lol.

I would never endorse a candidate that had a bad policy in Puerto Rico. He has a fantastic policy. The best I have seen from a potential nominee or candidate for the presidency in my lifetime. Why? He cares about Boricuas. Who knows what the bankers will do if he signs legislation to wipe out the debt? Who are the socialists in Puerto Rico? My deceased mother's old party the PIP. They are challenged now by Victoria Ciudadana. Led by Alexandra Lugaro. She is growing. But the socialist scene is not dead in the USA. If we get well funded again in Puerto Rico? The sky is the limit with people tired of the two majority parties being corrupt idiots. Like in the USA. The third party of independentistas with a Bernie administration in the White House might just turn the tide. Politics is not for the faint of heart BJ. Got to be fearless. Accept defeats, setbacks and problems. And keep going and going til you get to the finish line. Never give up.....Hasta La Victoria Siempre as the old revolutionaries in proletarian revolutions in Latin America had to say....got to keep going!

His supporter AOC is pro independence and endorses his 'policy'for Puerto Rico.

There is a lot you don't know about Puerto Rico BJ.

You stated you don't give a shit. So I won't elaborate.

But if you piss off enough people who fled the hurricane to live in Florida and that suck up Republican politician tried registering a bunch of Ricans for his Republican party and it failed...I don't have to guess where the cookie is going to crumble. The litmus test for Bernie is how many people who never have voted before are going to come out of Apathyville and make it happen? That is the reality.

There are 100 million non voters in the USA. Puerto Ricans are into politics big time BJ. I lived it my whole life. It is a team sport and constant. They will oust the damn governor and hit the street for weeks. I have seen my people in action BJ. Screamers, and active. They forced Rossello out. He was a damn puppet for the Right. He is damn gone. And he was a registered Democrat because Luis Fortuno's group tried to win over some racist Republican cabrones, and got the water thrown in their faces and they read the writing on the wall and switched to the Pelosi hypocritical liberal beggar team....and that did not work out either....so the statehood we want to be the 51st state see us roar never made it really.

Eventually you are going to force a bad situation. Who knows what that looks like? I don't have a crystal ball BJ.

It is an interesting part of history.

I don't know how it will work out.

You keep thinking you know Latin America BJ. You don't. You never got el corazon to see us properly.

Get the corazon and all will be accurate for you. No corazon? No progress.

Relampaguito, callous not caring has no influence on the world. Remember that.

[late]

We will revisit your attempts at whataboutism

One of the things you guys have to do all the time is try and drag everyone down to Trumps level.

It's an impossible task, and you have my pity.

But... Sanders wrote about sexual fantasies, when he was young. One page...

Trump, on the other hand, is a sexual predator.

So if it comes down to a choice between them, do you want the nice guy or the monster.

[Donna]

Bernie's historical comments are a bit awkward and uncouth, but inappropriate discussions about sex and light-hearted lechery were part and parcel for his generation at that age.

[Rich]

Just watched a bit of the debate. I had a complete change of heart. I thought it was Warren that I most disliked, maybe followed by Bloomberg. Wow, Joe Biden, he's totally demented. He makes all the other candidates look sensible and rational.