It seemed obvious to me that Warren caught Sanders in a substantial lie and was understandably upset.

This is the old sexist standby: “I’d vote for a woman, just not that woman.

I probably said something like that when I voted for Trump over HRC. But it wasn't "an old sexist standby". I really found HRC beyond the pale, just as now I find Trump beyond the pale. I will definitely vote for Warren over Trump if she isn't squeezed out by Biden or Sanders.

That's ridiculously generous of you, at least towards Warren. She knows perfectly well his position on the possibility of a woman president, and women running for office generally. she knows he campaigned vigorously for HRC after the nomination, and she knows that Sanders knows that HRC took the popular vote by over 3 million votes, so he obviously knows that it is highly possible for a woman to win the presidency. This is simply a bald-faced lie on Warren's part, but she has gained nothing electorally for this desperate smear. Sanders not only had a record fundraising day after this surfaced, but at least one poll has him up 2 points in Iowa, where he was already in the lead, with Warren stuck at 12%.

Sanders had also gone as far as to research whether a vice president can also head the Treasury with Warren in mind.

Nope.
Warren is lying.
Sanders would NEVER say that a woman couldn't be elected President.
Warren's mistake is telling laws that aren't remotely believable.
Sanders is obviously pro-women and has been since before Warren was lying about being Native American to abuse Affirmative Action set asides.
What was more appalling was that CNN then flat out lied and said Sanders said that right after he denied it.
It was so blatant the audience gasped. It wasn't "when did you stop beating your wife?" it was, "Senator Sanders killed his wife."
Warren and CNN are dishonest and amoral. Don't forget that CNN is the outlet that broke the story that Warren having 1/1024th DNA that was related to DNA that was a surrogate for Native American DNA validated her claim of being Native American.
Someone with a lot of pull at CNN is working as part of the Warren campaign. When you combine this with the complete disregard for truth and reality that CNN usually shows-it's a bad combination.

Six corporations own something like 90% of the media now.
And CNN is part of the corporate-media-complex.
So not too much of a surprise that they are going after Sanders.
The billionaires are worried he might win, so in a way, this is a good
sign.

It's 'telling' that they're not worried about Warren.

The 24 hour news channels depend on Trump to bring in the outrage required to keep up their viewing figures. So it makes sense that they should help give him a democrat opponent he can't lose against, like Elizabeth Warren.

With "help" like this, one struggles to imagine what sabotage might look like.

While it should be fairly obvious to most that Bernie Sanders political rivals are trying everything they can to get ahead of him, it's also true that the DNC and the Main Stream Media, are also trying to trash Bernie in an attempt to take him out as a candidate. The DNC and the MSM did the same thing the last time he attempted to win the nomination, and it appears they are doing so now.

The corporate MSM machine should be careful. Another candidate they trashed during the last election cycle, and ever since, became the President. It seems some voters have tied the corporate MSM together with the D.C. establishment, and voters that want an outsider to lead them may just see the MSM's attempts to denigrate a candidate as a ringing endorsement for the outsider.

As a side note, I find it humorous that the MSM attempts to diminish Bernie's supporters as zealots and too extreme to be taken seriously... I thought that political candidates actually worked to gain the support of enthusiastic and motivated supporters? Or, is that just for the candidates that are acceptable to the Main Stream Media and the political Parties?

Voted for Trump in great part because Hillary Clinton was such a liar. Now he turned out to be an even bigger liar than she was. It sure would be nice to have a candidate who didn't lie so much, but now I don't know whether that would be Sanders or Warren.

Really? what "lie" did he tell here? It should be obvious to anyone with 1/4 of a brain that it was Warren who lied.

I was talking about Trump, not Sanders. Obviously.

But you said that you didn't know if it would be Sanders or Warren. Fauxcahontas is a fairly inveterate liar, so what choice do you have to make that's so agonizing, unless it's Buttigieg and/or Klobuchar versus Sanders? (I don't think much of Biden either.)

Okay but that means the Dems need to nominate someone else, because if it's Trump vs Sanders I'll vote for Sanders.

How democratic of you. Cue the DNC to replay their 2016 gambit and disenfranchise the Democrats base.

BTW what exactly is wrong with either Denmark or Holland? You ever been there?

Methinks you're missing sarcasm on Kent's part. You could have taken his comment - if not him - seriously if he had said "Otherwise America goes the way of Venezuela or Cuba or Pol Pot's Cambodia," but I think naming two countries generally well thought of pretty much everywhere but among the Fox/Rush/Trump right was a very strong indication of sarcasm on his part, and that he himself thinks highly of those two worthy nation states.

Highest living standards in the world, good education systems, low crime, good social cohesion... oh the horror...

What are Denmark's demographics like?

If we can have those, then I'll accept any socialism you want.

America has a more advantageous demographic structure, as it has fewer elderly people, and more of its population are of working age than in Denmark. It would be cheaper and simpler to run a comprehensive social protection system in the USA than it is in Denmark.

First, the age distribution between the countries isn't all that different. Second, the vast difference in population makes any comparison meaningless. Social welfare is hardly cheap and simple, no matter where you are, but it's worse the bigger the population.

Social welfare is cheap and simple compared with crime and political instability the difference between the numbers aged over 65 in Denmark compared with the USA is about 3% - that may not sound much, but the cost of caring for this many elderly people can far outstrip the costs of, say, free university education, or other allegedly high cost services to young people.

LOL. I'm pretty sure that you missed my point intentionally, but there is a demographic factor in the U.S. that is FAR more significant than age, and it would make a comprehensive social protection system ruinous and unworkable.

I don't know whether you think different skin colours, or different religions, or different national origins are the problem. But I think all are negligible when compared with civil institutions, physical and human capital, and political will to make social systems work, which America has.

You ignore a key demographic component in your answer.

Age, health, education, these are key characteristics of a population from an economic perspective.

Religion, skin colour, sexuality, these are trivial, irrelevant.

And utterly unique and non-transferable.

I don't think so, Scandinavia used to be Viking, they'd terrorise Europe, invading, raping, pillaging and slaving, burning down those monasteries Rod Dreher is so fond of. Sounds a lot like America in the Middle East. Then they lost their power, became socialists, and made themselves like this. There's no reason other countries can't also implement effective social programmes to improve living standards.

There isn't much to address in any of what you written, other than to say it's cynical and wrong. The fact that Scandinavia's an exception more than the norm alone is probably a hint it's not something you can just do anywhere else.

Scandinavia isn't a country. It's 5 different countries. They don't have the same language, or the same resources. They do have a history of similar democratic socialist governments though.

Actually, it's four different countries, all with a North Germanic language. Finland isn't Germanic or even Indo-European, being Uralic, along with Hungary and Estonia. It is much like its Scandinavian neighbors in a number of ways, however, that is true.

Except Denmark and Holland reject the socialist label. In fact, the Prime Minister of Denmark basically told Sanders to please shut up about Denmark being a socialist country. They are a market based country.

https://www.investors.com/d...

Strictly speaking, socialism was an abject failure which ended with the fall of the Iron Curtain, There is an unfortunate tendency to conflate "socialism" with what is called the "welfare state." The United States is a welfare state but can hardly be mistaken for a socialist state.

I think I see it mostly the same way you do, but with semantic differences. I would argue that communism - the totalitarian version of socialism - was the abject failure. Any first world modern state is a blend of market-based economies and socialism. The question is always which exchanges are best left to market forces and which are best managed from above. And then, how much management to provide. I caution against seeing socialism vs capitalism as some binary switch to flip.

Smartest statement I've seen in years.

And the fact is that many of these welfare states were implemented by self-declared socialists, including many parties that were members of the Socialist, or Second, International.

Unfortunately, many of these socialist and labor parties hopped on the neo-liberal train in the 1980's, and are today deathly afraid of their own Bernie Sanders (see Corbyn, Jeremy), and even more afraid of scaring off international finance and the German Central Bank.

Point taken. Perhaps "radical socialism" would have been more accurate. Your description of the modern state as a "blend" is spot-on. An economics professor I once had called ours a "mixed economy", which was a phrase that has always stuck in my mind.

Exactly.

Not really. For one, the Scandinavian countries are free traders, something Bernie Sanders has opposed his entire adult life.

Social democratic and labor parties around the world turned neo-liberal in the 1980's, including the Scandinavian ones. They've been helping to rip up the "social contract" between Capital and Labor, and the social welfare state, ever since, as well as reversing previous nationalizations and launching privatization. This phenomenon has included Scandinavia, which is why the parties there are so sensitive to all this talk in the U.S. about them being models of "socialism."

Fact is, all non-Marxist "socialist" countries are market based, and are in fact capitalist at the economic base. When did any Scandinavian "socialist" country ever expropriate any major corporations?

You might actually want to do a bit of research on that point. Going back 60, 70 or 80 years, there might be some nationalizations of railroads, utilities, energy companies and other major industries not involved in the actual manufacturing of goods in Scandinavia. Great Britain certainly saw such nationalizations, although revolutionary leftists sometimes dismissed them as "lemon socialism" because the capitalist class was fobbing off money-losing or capital-intensive sectors of the economy on the government, in order to concentrate on more profitable enterprises.

Bernie Sanders must not be allowed to win. Otherwise America goes the way of Denmark

You mean, immigration-restrictionist Denmark?

We should be so lucky.

IIRC, "when they go low, we go high" was a line from Michelle Obama's speech, not from HRC'. Hillary may have applauded it, however, whether or not she let it govern her actions at all.

It has seemed to me for some time now that Warren is one of those who makes stuff up and then actually starts to believe the lie herself. No really. There are people like that, and it sure seems like she suffers from that malady.

It’s hard for me to believe that Bernie would say something like that, at least not in the context that Warren is implying. She is also seen by most as the George Costanza of the current crop of dem candidates (quite an accomplishment considering). Being that this admonition violates the purported truce she had with Sanders, I would tend to think that this is her official reneging on their agreement for political gain.

It’s hard for me to believe that Bernie would say something like that

Especially in 2018, after HRC almost won the presidency in 2016, garnering over 3 million more votes than Trump. Even Trump, with his rather obvious crude sexism, would not discount the possibility that a woman could beat him.