It’s a party with chops opposed to a party that’s been weakened through its blind obedience to him.
I would have gone with:
It’s a party with chops opposed to a party of flops,
blinded by the orange mop that sits atop Commander Flop
caught in presidential crisis, Big Mac, porkchop, or Ivanka on top.
Have a nice day.
some group needs to start a “boycott Starbucks if Schultz runs” campaign. Get millions of signatures.
Put the squeeze on his narcissistic urges, which only help Trump.
It would be a gift of pure comedy gold to Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping.
I had to use the archive and go back to 2004 to find the excerpt below, and there were just a couple of the DIY Starbucks street theater intervention scripts on the website for that date. But I know there are more; e.g. the one where two people on cellphones loudly try to meet up at the coffee shop at certain intersection in NYC, but they’ve gone to the separate Starbucks that were catty-corner from each other there. Anyway, just this one and the “Virtually Hip” script were there.
But there is a Howard Schultz reference:
- As the party rages against the cappuccino machine, be sure to, as always, be
polite to the baristas. Three ex-buckers sing in the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir.
Some latte-makers have kids and lot of them have repetitive stress injuries and
some are even trying to start a union, secretly in touch with the IWW. So reach
out to them and ask them to dance. If they feel angry because their critics are
swiveling and semi-naked, well, be nice and tell them to read the report. Very
few Starbucks employees know anything about the realities in the coffee groves,
just as few Americans, even lefties, do.
- Make sure that you wave at Howard in the surveillance cameras. He is a
micro-manager of the Michael Eisner variety. The day before a union election at
a Starbucks in New York, Howard was there in person handing out Mets tickets
> and pizza, trying to influence the vote. If Howard shows up, shake rattle and roll
the boy. He needs some Chakra inflammation, or Chaka Khan¹s claymation!
Is there a strain of Masochism in the Nation?
After 2016???
How many ways can you say “dissuasion”?
I’m open.
ETA Obama was lucky this did not happen to him in both of his cycles. After all, there were plenty of people who could have appealed to either Obama or Hillary sectors of the Democratic electorate
It’s been brought to my attention that Starbucks initiated a “race-relations rap sessions” program in its stores, in efforts to change race relations in the U.S.
Should Schultz succeed in getting a foothold as a Third Party Candidate for President in 2020, he will “change” race relations in the U.S.
For the worse.
There aren’t a lot a Starbucks in Trump territory, but those folks all know the name well and it has safe connotations. Don’t knock that effect:
Bingo.
Enough said. You’re on the money.
Article in the LAT today about how spectacularly well the Davos crowd is doing post 2009. Not sure where Howard fits in there but you can be sure he’s knocking at the door.
Although true,I think there are a couple of structural issues we all need to keep in mind:
You read about the huge (north of 80%) support of Trump among Republicans, but that masks the large number of disaffected Republicans who’ve left the party and now call themselves Democrats or independents. A very large number of the “old” republican party have taken refuge in the Democratic party because they dislike the guy as much as the rest of us, and this has had definite influence on the Democratic platform.
Those disaffected Republicans now camped out in the Democratic party aren’t here forever. I think a step coming very soon will be that the Bill Kristols, Michael Steeles and other traditional Republicans will find their spines and make a move. I probably won’t get them their party back, but it will finalize the schism and start the process of forking off a new entity that’s free of treasonous Russian and mob ties. This could well be accelerated by the move to the left we’re currently seeing, with the arrival of AOC and the reaction against Trump.
In reaction to all this, those on the Left of the Democratic Party need to realize that those “Corporatist Dems” they rail against are actually their allies in the fight against the Republican mob and the disaffected “Redstate Civil Ware Reenactors”, and should be treated as potential political allies, not enemies. In a functioning parliamentary system, they would bee seen as members of the party you form an alliance with to gain the majority and control of the government. In Canada, the NDP and the Liberals unite against the Conservatives, in Australia the Labor and Green Parties (plus some Independents) formed a minority government in 2010. They don’t all agree on everything, but are pragmatic enough to realize that half a loaf is better than none. In our borked system, you vote minority and the other guys win, so we need to accept that we need to do our strategic voting in the primaries and stop breaking things in the General Elections that follow.
None of the above is a surprise or new to anybody on this board, but we need to keep it to the front of our minds as we try to interpret things going forward. I’d just love to see proportional voting to help address this mess, but until then we need to instill some discipline in our thinking or we’re doomed to more of this crap going forward…
It’s really very telling that Julian Castro finds it UNTHINKABLE that Democrats in 2020 should be capable of drawing an effective distinction in the minds of voters between their own candidate and not just one, but TWO billionaire oligarchs.
Are you against Democracy too?
We should have more than two parties. We’re calcified here with the two party system and I really don’t see how anyone can think it’s working well anymore. Not after what we saw happen to Obama. Not after we saw the Republicans almost succeed at establishing permanent dominance they want so much.
The parliamentary system is much more vital and has the potential to keep things at least a bit more honest.
Well maybe it should have. There’s no denying that. But you can say the same thing about 2008 too. It’s politics. People try to win. And sometimes it isn’t pretty. 2008 wasn’t pretty either.
Wow, I didn’t know that, thank you. It really is awesome news.
Yes, the Democrat will be so insufficiently pure that people will vote for Schultz, a literal corporate centrist. Brilliant logic you have there.
Agree that a parliamentary system is more vital…but the US doesn’t have one. Until we do, third party candidates, particularly those for executive offices, will continue to amount to nothing more than spoilers.
Hating a given third party candidate and hating the idea of third parties are two different things. I think we’d be better off if we had a livelier political scene with many divergent points of view, but you’re right that since we don’t have that, the candidates who come forward are generally spoilers. Or on the national level they are. On the local level, they can be sincere and actually good candidates and if we are ever to have viable third parties, they need to gather strength at the local level first. Right now this hoping to grab the brass ring as a Green or a Libertarian is pretty much a pipe dream – or a wet dream in the case of people like Shultz. But I don’t think it’s a far off day when an Independent could win, so that’s something to think about. Real campaign finance reform, which we do need, would lead to that.
In the meantime, people like Shultz are going to continue to crop up and say stupid stuff and do stupid things and wreck certain consituency’s votes. No amount of griping is going to change that, nor is it really right to want to change that.
And let’s face it, if he were a candidate who’d siphon votes off the Republicans we’d all be saying heh heh heh.
Sure, but it requires a candidate with an ego big enough to think the world is dying to hear their amazing insight. Stein wasn’t created out of whole cloth by the GRU, she’s a genuine whackadoodle who’s been around for years. Yes, there are occasional cases where they run Rs under another party name or forge someone’s candidacy, but 99% of the time they’re backing someone who’s already running. Heck, 90% of the time they don’t bother to help them at all because the race isn’t close, and those people are running anyway. There are also Libertarians siphoning off Republican votes.
Agree 100% on the pay-to-run model (with the possible Trump exception).
But the other way of doing it is to appeal to vanity - to whisper in someone’s ear, over time, how they’re so smart they ought to run for president. For someone who’s written a bestselling book or become a cultural meme or has run a massively successful business, it’s a natural to start hearing that kind of thing. Not just Schultz, and Trump obviously, but Bloomberg and Bezos and Zuckerman to name a few.
It’s one of the most dangerous developments in politics that the smoke-filled rooms of party insiders has been replaced, not with a more democratic selection process, but with the smoke-filled rooms of a few mega-donors. When one of them is the candidate himself, well, there you go.
Eh…I continue to be unimpressed by him. His cliches aren’t quite as stale as, say, Tom Perez or Steny Hoyer’s, but they’re cliches nonetheless. He doesn’t seem to have any real vision or focus, something to give as an answer to “why are you running?” I’m not supporting anyone in particular right now but he’s behind Warren, Harris and Gillebrand in my view.