2020 democratic primary
Tom Steyer Thinks Voters Love Him For Who He Is Not For All His Money
We need to get money out of politics, for real.
January 13, 2020 04:03 PM
Tuesday's Democratic debate in Iowa will be as white as, well, Iowa. Cory Booker dropped out of the race today because he didn't make the cut. Neither did Andrew Yang or even wannabe Obama Deval Patrick. As a presidential candidate, Patrick is like the alien race on Doctor Who that you only remember exists when you're looking right at them. Hey, no one ever said politics was easy ... or diverse. The candidates who didn't make it this far just didn't have a message that connected with voters. That's Tom Steyer's story, and he'll pay you good money to believe it.
Steyer has spent $116 million in television advertising. This marketing budget normally reserved for Star Wars movies was focused on Nevada and South Carolina. Steyer has started to see a return on his investment. Recent polls have him at third place in Nevada with 12 percent support and second place in South Carolina with 15 percent. Yes, you read that correctly. Steyer is second -- the one after first -- in South Carolina. That's also the state where his campaign "borrowed" voter data from Kamala Harris, so I don't know why he's still allowed to compete at all. It's insulting.
What's even more insulting is that Steyer won't cop to trying to buy the primary. No, he just has a great message that the poor bastards in Nevada and South Carolina can't escape.
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</p><div id="a0fff" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="008B3H1578949512"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1216725676583260160" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">Billionaire businessman Tom Steyer says he made the cutoff for Tuesday's Democratic presidential debate because of… https://t.co/4q8k2iwe07</div> — POLITICO (@POLITICO)<a href="https://twitter.com/politico/statuses/1216725676583260160">1578924981.0</a></blockquote></div>
<p></p><blockquote><strong>STEYER: </strong>I think that the thing that has put me on this stage — and it is the same for every single person who's running for president — is message. I have a very simple message, which is, the government is broken. It's been bought by corporations.</blockquote><p>I also have a very simple message for Steyer: <a href="https://youtu.be/zlJtohZSsfY?t=21" target="_blank">Fuck you, asshole! </a> The other billionaire in the race, Mike Bloomberg, is running on a self-financed "I'm better than these other guys" platform. I don't agree but it's at least in the same solar system with honesty. Steyer is a plutocrat in denim, who's trying to pretend he's the head of some grassroots movement. A single billionaire buying the presidency is no better than corporations doing so. Corporations at least have shareholders and a board. </p><p>Steyer spouted this bullshit on CNN's <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/01/12/jake_tapper_to_tom_steyer_would_you_be_on_stage_if_you_werent_spending_millions_of_dollars.html" target="_blank">"State of the Union,"</a> and to his credit, Jake Tapper called him out on it. </p><blockquote><strong>TAPPER:</strong> So the reason people can hear your message, though, of course, is because of the TV ads and the millions of dollars you have spent. Let's talk about the two states that you polled well in that got you on the debate stage, South Carolina and Nevada. You and your campaign, you make up the overwhelming majority of television ad spending in those states; 91 percent of television ad spending in South Carolina is from you; 97 percent of television ad spending in Nevada is from you. Do you not think that it's your millions and the flood of advertising in those states that's why you did well in the polls and are now on the debate stage?</blockquote><p>Of course, Steyer disagreed, because as a child, he probably thought all the kids coming over to swim in his pool really just wanted to hang out with him. <em>[Editrix's note: He doesn't seem like a terrible fellow, and I hope he had childhood friends who liked him. But the money thing is pretty yeesh.] </em>It's still possible that Steyer could spend hundreds of millions on his vanity campaign and only win a handful of delegates. But there's a worst-case scenario where Biden or Bernie Sanders catch a bad cold and Steyer ends up the nominee. He's never been fully vetted and he's the worst possible candidate to run against Donald Trump. Steyer might fancy himself a Bruce Wayne-style billionaire to Trump's Lex Luthor, but most voters will find it a distinction without a difference. Trump is also actively pushing the nation into war, so a Democratic nominee with zero foreign policy experience or credentials is unwise to say the least.</p><p>Steyer needs to go away, and we need to start <a href="https://www.wonkette.com/it-is-time-to-admit-that-our-entire-primary-process-makes-no-damn-sense" target="_blank">publicly financing</a> political campaigns to stop this madness. That'll probably never happen, but maybe we can get a campaign finance law on the books that applies the individual donor maximum to the candidates themselves. If Steyer had to rely on true "grassroots support" to fund his campaign, you'd forget he existed as quickly as you did Deval Patrick.</p><p>[<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/tom-steyer-is-surging-in-south-carolina-and-nevada-does-it-matter/2020/01/11/a81a4e34-33b4-11ea-91fd-82d4e04a3fac_story.html" target="_blank">Washington Post</a>]<br></p><p><em>Follow Stephen Robinson on </em><em><a href="https://twitter.com/SER1897" target="_blank">Twitter.</a></em><br></p><p><strong>Yr Wonkette is supported by reader donations. Please send us money to keep the writers paid and the servers humming. Thank you, we love you.</strong></p><p></p><form name="donation" method="post" class="donation-form"><p class="subheadline">How often would you like to donate?</p><div class="form-row row--plan"><label class="plan-type__label"><input type="radio" name="plan_type" value="once" class="plan-type" required="" checked> Just once
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2016 Presidential Election
Yeah, Pennsylvania's Great. But Have You Tried ARIZONA?
Mark Kelly is a goddamn astronaut!
January 08, 2020 02:20 PM
Go West, young man! Don't spend all your time and energy in the Rust Belt, because we have just as good a shot at taking Arizona's 11 electoral votes as we do Wisconsin's 10. And we have a better than even chance of picking up a Senate seat in the Grand Canyon state if we can somehow induce our voters to show up like they did in 2018, when they rejected Martha McSally the first time. Which is why the senator just hit the panic button and begged for a bailout from out-of-state donors.
This morning, Public Policy Polling (PPP), a Democratic pollster, published new numbers on Arizona and Iowa. Trump has never been popular in Arizona, and 52 percent of respondents to a phone/text poll conducted in the past two weeks disapprove of the president. Even against a historically unpopular candidate in 2016 (we're not going to fight about this now!), Trump was only able to win by 3.6 percent, as compared to Romney's 9 point margin in 2012. And while he polls basically even with Joe Biden, and only slightly ahead of Sanders, Warren, and Buttigieg, about 8 percent of respondents remain undecided.
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<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMjQ5NTE3NC9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY0ODg3NTY3MH0.wiwXyOgy7EvTKfjyMfLy3b1GXLP6nP0xfgsXW_81Lb8/img.png?width=980" id="43c6d" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="7859f5aceced7d9190ddd8b95b6e26ba" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image">
<small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">via <a href="https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/polls/democratic-unity-will-determine-trumps-fate/" target="_blank">PPP</a></small></p><p>And that's where it gets interesting. Because 80 percent of the undecideds <a href="https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/ArizonaJanuary2020.pdf" target="_blank">said</a> they disapproved of Trump, and a majority of those same respondents broke for Clinton four years ago. Here's how PPP broke it down:</p><blockquote>In Arizona more than 80% of the undecideds in every match up between Trump and the individual Democratic candidates disapproves of Trump. And the undecideds also voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 by anywhere from 45-50 points. If you allocate the undecideds based on whether they approve of Trump or not, all of the Democrats move into leads ranging from 4-6 points. If you allocate the undecideds based on whether they voted for Clinton or Trump in 2016, all the Democrats move into leads ranging from 2-4 points.</blockquote><p>They also showed a similar trend in <a href="https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/IowaJanuary2020.pdf" target="_blank">Iowa</a>. But it's 55 degrees in Phoenix and 21 in Des Moines. So let's not muddy it up right now by traipsing across the country. Instead we'll check in with Senator Martha McSally, who got beat by Kyrsten Sinema in 2018, and was then appointed to sit out John McCain's term by Republican Governor Doug Ducey. McSally's now facing Mark Kelly, an IRL astronaut married to the wildly popular former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, and McSally's getting <a href="https://www.azmirror.com/2020/01/03/under-siege-mcsally-pleads-for-outside-help-on-the-airwaves/" target="_blank">absolutely hammered</a> for her vote to get rid of the mandate for health insurers to cover pre-existing conditions.</p><blockquote>We don't have the resources to fight. If I went up on TV right now, my campaign coffers would be empty. If we're going to fight back with a TV ad, it's going to cost us millions of dollars. [...]<br><br>We need close air support to show up. There's outside groups. We can't talk to them. We can't invite them, but we pray for them every day. We need conservative outside groups, you know, to wake up, and get involved, and start muddying up the landscape a little bit, so I'm not just sitting here taking incoming and not having any A-10s show up, you know overhead, to help me out.</blockquote><p><em>Whiiiiiiiiiiiine.</em> Why can't Martha McSally's campaign coordinate with outside PACs directly? Unfair! Why won't they come in and run attack ads to smear Mark Kelly, since McSally is such a crap candidate that she got outraised the last three fundraising quarters and can't afford to do it herself. Boohoo!</p><p>Oh, hey, check out this hilariously mean ad that the Democratic PAC "Middle Class Fighting to Restore Arizona's Unity and Decency," AKA "McFraud," just <a href="https://www.rollcall.com/news/campaigns/new-super-pac-takes-aim-at-arizona-gop-sen-martha-mcsally" target="_blank">put on the air</a>.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-youtube">
<span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="b9a2379c1d0b229b16b5fa69f2336d97"><iframe type="lazy-iframe" data-runner-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9e0ilOvUu4U?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span>
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">McFraud PAC: McSallys Restaurant</small>
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9e0ilOvUu4U" target="_blank">www.youtube.com</a>
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</p><p>In August, an OH Predictive Insights Poll captioned <a href="https://ohpredictive.com/press-releases/poll-kelly-flies-by-mcsally-in-q3/" target="_blank">"Kelly Flies by McSally in Q3"</a> (badum-tssssssss) had Kelly up 46-41, with 13 percent undecided. PPP's <a href="https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/ArizonaJanuary2020.pdf" target="_blank">polling</a> yesterday was basically the same, and it showed McSally's approval rating is 10 points underwater. Which may or may not be the result of clinging to Donald Trump like a barnacle.</p><p>The bottom line is, <em>we can win here</em>. And unlike in Georgia or North Carolina, we've had a strong Democratic Senate candidate from the get-go, sparing us the expense and infighting of a protracted primary. So don't sleep on the Grand Canyon State, kids! And stay away from McSally's "Disingenuous" Fries -- they'll only give you gas.</p><p>[<a href="https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/polls/democratic-unity-will-determine-trumps-fate/" target="_blank">PPP</a>]</p><p>Follow<a href="https://twitter.com/5DollarFeminist" target="_blank"> Liz Dye</a> (FKA Your FDF) on Twitter!</p><p><strong>Please click here to keep your Wonkette snarky and ad-free!</strong></p><p></p><form name="donation" method="post" class="donation-form"><p class="subheadline">How often would you like to donate?</p><div class="form-row row--plan"><label class="plan-type__label"><input type="radio" name="plan_type" value="once" class="plan-type" required="" checked> Just once
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Ukraine
Rudy's Fixers Keep Breaking Sh*t
CLOWN. SHOW.
November 04, 2019 01:26 PM
In the fall of 2018, Chucklefucker Lev Parnas was so broke that he had to borrow money to pay for the herring and schnapps at his son's bris. The following summer, he was swimming in cash, enjoying charter flights, luxury cars, and personal bodyguards. What changed? According to CNN, Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash waved the magic money wand and started raining cash down on his American fixer.
"I'm the best-paid interpreter in the world," Parnas joked, according to CNN's sources. Firtash's disheveled hairball lawyers Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova back this up, minus the wink-wink, nudge-nudge, insisting that it was they who hired the jet-setting former stockbroker and aspiring natural gas magnate as a "translator" for their dealings with Firtash.
"That's a crock," Toensing snapped, when NBC suggested that Firtash was paying Parnas directly. Later her firm issued a more sober statement, saying "Mr. Firtash met Mr. Parnas for the first time in June 2019. Mr. Firtash had no business relationship with Mr. Parnas or Mr. Fruman. Mr. Parnas was retained as a translator by the law firm of diGenova & Toensing. No money has been paid to Mr. Parnas by Mr. Firtash beyond his work as a translator for the law firm."
We have questions!
<p>First of all, CNN reports that Parnas is the one who connected the hairballs with the oligarch. So if you buy that Parnas was a "translator," you have to swallow the additional story that, upon meeting Parnas for the first time, the billionaire immediately turned around, fired his famous American attorney Lanny Davis, and, on his new friend's suggestion, hired replacement lawyers who just happen to be connected to the president's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani. Oh, and then those new lawyers hired Firtash's friend to be their translator. And no one's jaw is big enough to eat that bullshit sandwich.</p><p>Second, Parnas, who <a href="https://www.wonkette.com/mo-money-mo-problems-for-rudy-n-the-chucklef-cks" target="_blank">couldn't afford</a> to toast his boychik's perfect shmeckel in October, was paying off the $100,000 bris loan in August. After several trips to Vienna over the summer, he settled up his $30,000 debt to a charter flight company and ramped up his private flying. You know who's been holed up in Vienna for five years trying to get the US government not to extradite him on bribery charges? DMITRY FIRTASH, that's who. And, lest we forget, Parnas and his crony Igor Fruman were arrested at the airport with one-way tickets to Vienna in October.</p><p>Third of all, Parnas and his crony Igor Fruman just got<a href="https://www.wonkette.com/giulianis-ukrainian-fixers-get-lock-her-upped-on-campaign-finance-charges-spill-it-fellas" target="_blank"> indicted </a>for funneling $325,000 through their company Global Energy Producers to the pro-Trump America First Action PAC. And the reason the government knew that this was a fraudulent campaign contribution that didn't come from GEP's business was that <em>the company didn't make any money.</em> So if GEP was paying to charter airplanes, it wasn't with business income.</p><p>According to CNN, "Parnas told some associates that Firtash was funding the flights." In fact, Firtash was paying for all of it.</p><blockquote>In private conversations with would-be business associates before his arrest this month, Parnas boasted that his newfound luxurious lifestyle was bankrolled by Firtash, two sources told CNN. Beginning in mid-August, this included around-the-clock bodyguards, two luxury SUVs for his entourage, and at least six private charter flights in the past several months, according to the sources as well as documents exclusively obtained by CNN.</blockquote><p>And we're not going to take you down the rabbithole of Parnas, Fruman, and their co-indictee David Correia trying to scare up a deal to export Qatari natural gas by claiming they had Dmitry Firtash's backing -- because this story is too complicated already and these guys are so clearly full of shit. But it really doesn't sound like they were just lowly "translators" for Firtash. Like, not at all.</p><p>Kinda looks like <a href="https://www.wonkette.com/help-please-explain-all-rudy-the-chucklefux-weird-ukraine-ties-they-are-too-confuuuuse" target="_blank">we were right</a> last week when we said that Parnas is right in the middle of all this shit, huh?</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMjA1Nzc4NS9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYxNjY3MTk4MH0.6zmJWne6cEPVOP-TbvkuVsB4dfpnEuXG80P1TyRIWes/img.png?width=980" id="62d9d" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="07f960801259724b5815e96880c1aac5" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image">
</p><p><br></p><p>Right now, the FBI is so far up the Chucklefucks' asses, they're getting high off the reek of aftershave, hair gel, and half-digested pumpernickel. The government has info from dozens of phones and bank accounts and is already running it through a taint team. So if Johnny Law hasn't worked it out already, he'll know pretty soon where they got the $500,000 to pay Rudy Giuliani for his ... services. He'll know whether GEP paid for its own charter flights, or if someone else fronted the money. And he's going to find out how much of that $1 million fee that Hairball and Hairball, Attorneys at Law collected from Dmitry Firtash wound up getting passed on to their AHEM translators.</p><p>Good luck, Vicky!</p><p>[<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/01/politics/parnas-firtash-giuliani-ties/index.html" target="_blank">CNN</a>]</p><p>Follow <a href="https://twitter.com/5DollarFeminist" target="_blank">Liz</a> (AKA your FDF) on Twitter!</p><p><strong>Please click here to fund your Wonkette, who keeps an eye on these grifters so you don't have to!</strong></p><p></p><form name="donation" method="post" class="donation-form"><p class="subheadline">How often would you like to donate?</p><div class="form-row row--plan"><label class="plan-type__label"><input type="radio" name="plan_type" value="once" class="plan-type" required="" checked> Just once
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2020 democratic primary
Justice Kennedy Was Not Good, Mayor Pete. He Was Not Good.
We do not need another one.
October 26, 2019 02:07 PM
Say it ain't so, Pete.
In an interview with Cosmo this week, Mayor Pete Buttigieg decided to talk about his plans for the Supreme Court by ... praising former Supreme Court Justice and lifelong Republican Anthony Kennedy, who stepped down so Donald Trump could put Brett Kavanaugh on the Court.
So I've floated several ideas and deliberately kept some level of open-mindedness about which ones are going to work best. One of them would be to have 15 members, but 5 of them can only be seated if the other 10 unanimously agree. The idea here is you get more justices who think for themselves. Justices like Justice Kennedy or Justice Souter, and there are many legal scholars who think this could be done without a constitutional amendment under current law.
Sigh.
Where to start?
<p>Anthony Kennedy is a lifelong Republican. He was appointed to the Ninth Circuit by Gerald Ford and to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan. Reagan nominated Kennedy after famously getting Borked when he tried to put Nixon Solicitor General Robert Bork and then Douglas Ginsburg on the bench. While he occasionally broke with his buddies over on the right wing of the Court, he was generally a reliable conservative vote. As Jessica Mason Pieklo put it <a href="https://rewire.news/article/2019/10/25/mayor-pete-justice-kennedy-and-the-myth-of-a-nonpartisan-supreme-court/" target="_blank">over at Rewire</a>, "there are few myths as persistent as the myth of Justice Anthony Kennedy as an independently minded justice and the Supreme Court as a nonpolitical institution[.]"<br></p><p>In one of his last acts on the Supreme Court, Justice Kennedy was the deciding vote <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/17-965_h315.pdf" target="_blank">upholding Trump's Muslim ban</a>. He wrote a concurrence that began, "I join the Court's opinion in full." Kennedy literally wrote <em><a href="https://casetext.com/case/citizens-united-v-federal-election-comn?ref=Sb!ILRPD3" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Citizens United</a></em>. He voted to strike down handgun bans in Washington, DC and Chicago. He routinely gave the green light to corporations to pollute our water, air, and land. He okayed Christian prayers at town council meetings. He helped make George W. Bush President in <em>Bush v. Gore</em>. Kennedy voted that the federal government could criminalize medical marijuana even in states where it was legal -- in fact, he rarely saw a drug law he didn't approve of. He helped gut labor unions. He wrote the opinion upholding a federal ban on certain late-term abortions. Justice Kennedy voted to destroy the Voting Rights Act and uphold voter suppression.</p><p>That is not my idea of someone who Democrats should be putting on the highest court in the land.</p><p>Yes, Justice Kennedy was good on LGBTQ rights. The <em>Obergefell </em>opinion is beautifully written. I have friends who have had excerpts of it read at their weddings. As a bisexual woman (and civil rights lawyer), it was an incredibly important case for me. I will never forget the day marriage equality became the law of the land.</p><p>But if Justice Kennedy <em>really </em>cared about LGBTQ people or women, he wouldn't have cut a deal with Donald Trump to retire and put Kegs Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. Kennedy waited through the 8 years of the Obama presidency to allow a Republican to appoint his replacement -- and not just any Republican, Donald fucking Trump. As it was put by <a href="https://rewire.news/article/2019/10/25/mayor-pete-justice-kennedy-and-the-myth-of-a-nonpartisan-supreme-court/" target="_blank">Rewire</a>,</p><blockquote>[N]othing left LGBTQ people and Kennedy's own legacy more at risk than his decision last summer to retire. Unless Kennedy was living under a rock, he knew the Trump administration had the rights of LGBTQ people teed up for rollback and that anyone named to replace him would be a reliably anti-LGBTQ vote. Despite campaign promises to the contrary, President Trump has shown his administration is not at all interested in affirming the "dignity" of LGBTQ people that Kennedy's Obergefell decision praised. So when it came to choosing between the lives of LGBTQ people and the peace of mind of knowing a Republican would name his replacement, Kennedy chose the latter.</blockquote><p>The <a href="https://www.wonkette.com/scotus-preview" target="_blank">2020 Supreme Court term</a> will see decisions about whether LGBTQ people are protected by federal civil rights laws and whether Louisiana can put absolutely bullshit restrictions on abortion access.</p><p>Pete's plan also fails to account for the damage that has already been done to the federal judiciary by Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell. Over 150 Trump appointees have already been put on the federal bench -- that's nearly a quarter of all federal judges. In addition to being unqualified and evil, a lot of them are very young. They will do damage to the country for decades to come. Unless drastic action is taken, I don't see this being fixed within my lifetime.</p><p>With all of this in mind, I do want to point out that Pete <a href="https://rewire.news/article/2019/10/25/mayor-pete-justice-kennedy-and-the-myth-of-a-nonpartisan-supreme-court/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">changed his tune</a> after getting a LOT of backlash from Democratic court watchers.</p><blockquote>To Buttigieg's credit, his campaign quickly reached out to Rewire.News to clarify the comments in Cosmopolitan. A spokesperson directed me to comments Buttigieg made at a campaign stop yesterday in New Hampshire where he identified Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the kind of justice he'd nominate should he be elected president. He also released a policy plan this week designed to build power for women, and it includes using support for reproductive rights as a litmus test for future judicial nominees.</blockquote><p>So that's good. But we also need to stop the fetishization of Justice Kennedy as "independent" or the idea of someone a Democrat should ever be nominating. </p><p>There are three incredible women on the Court who Democratic candidates like Pete can look to for inspiration. Give me another RBG, Elena Kagan, or Sonia Sotomayor any day.</p><p>Hopefully now, Mayor Pete will remember that he's running in the DEMOCRATIC primary?</p><p>[ <a href="https://www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/a29550621/pete-buttigieg-cosmopolitan-interview-medicare-scotus/" target="_blank">Cosmo</a> / <a href="https://rewire.news/article/2019/10/25/mayor-pete-justice-kennedy-and-the-myth-of-a-nonpartisan-supreme-court/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Rewire</a> ]</p><p><strong>Wonkette is independent and fully funded by readers like you. 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