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Given that I work with a number of far-leftists, I can assure you that many people genuinely supported Bernie Sanders' run for the democratic nomination, and still do.
Reading back through the various twitter streams from the 2020 caucuses, you can clearly see a trend in which folks started out being very pro-Sanders and pro-Warren, and predicting that Biden wouldn't be able to cross the threshold. Then, after Biden won the nomination, the tone changed dramatically, to one of "Well, he's not who I'd have wanted, be we have to vote for him anyway in order to keep bad orange man from remaining in office."
Given that I work with a number of far-leftists, I can assure you that many people genuinely supported Bernie Sanders' run for the democratic nomination, and still do.
Just because the useful idiots support the plant doesn't mean he isn't a plant. He exists to shift the overton window and to galvanize support for the DNC. He absolutely never would have been allowed to win the nomination.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison attends a sausage sizzle at Norwood Primary School in Launceston on election day in May 2019.
SYDNEY — When votersgo to the polls Saturday for Australia’s parliamentary elections, they’ll find themselves facing a difficult choice: Do they want onions on that?
Election day Down Under isn’t just about democracy — it’s also about “democracy sausages.” From the Top End to Tasmania, thousands of Australians will follow the smell of sizzling meat from the polling booth to a nearby food stall where they will buy a crispy sausage on white bread.
Like grease on a napkin, the tasty tradition has so saturated Australia that it’s become shorthand for the electoral process itself. On Twitter, election-related tweets are accompanied with a sausage-on-bread emoji. A website guides hungry voters to the nearest sausage-slinging polling site. And sated citizens often post pictures of their democracy sausages on social media — the Aussie version of the American “I voted” sticker.
“It’s a very uniquely Australian phenomenon,” said Anika Gauja, a political scientist at the University of Sydney. “It’s a sort of an expression of the community and the collective aspects of voting in Australia.”
In the study of democracy sausages — sausagology? — Gauja’s expertise is second to none. She began surveying the sausages on sale at polling places around Sydney during the 2016 federal election. Three years ago, she tried so many snags — as sausages are sometimes called here — that she felt sick.
Gauja said she gorges herself on democracy sausages because the simple, inexpensive food says something about the country’s strong egalitarian ethos. She goes so far as to call it “Australia’s national dish.”
In the United States, elections are often decided by who can motivate more supporters to leave work and cast a ballot. Lines can be long, and the people in them hangry. Some food stands set up on Election Day in the United States have drawn threats of felony charges.
But in Australia, compulsory voting and Saturday elections mean polling sites often feel more like community festivals.
“It’s not a contested thing” as it is in the United States, said Judith Brett, the author of a book on Australia’s electoral process. “People vote on their way to the beach. They’ve got the kids. They might meet friends. You can buy something to eat and drink.”
A democracy sausage sign at a polling place in Sydney in 2019.
Community groups have sold jams, cakes and other goods at the polls for around a century, she said. But it was only in the 1980s, when portable gas barbecues became widespread, that fundraisers — often to benefitschools — began selling sausages.
The term “democracy sausage” didn’t heat up until about a decade ago, Brett said.
That’s when Annette Tyler sent out a hungry tweet. It was the night before a state election in Western Australia and Tyler, then in her late 20s, asked people to share photos of the sausage options at their polling place using the hashtag #democracysausage.
The snag snaps started pouring in. The data manager and a few friends began plotting the stalls on a map — and quickly compiled almost 1,200 of them.
“It started out as me just out of kind of wanting to know where I could find a sausage,” Tyler said. “But we found there was a [knowledge] gap and, being a bunch of data nerds, we thought we’d run with it.”
That’s how DemocracySausage.org was born. By the 2019 federal election, the number of documented stands on the site had more than doubled to 2,420. This year the number of stalls is on pace to grow again.
The website doesn’t have advertising, which means Tyler and her friends lose money on it. But it’s worth it, she said.
“Election days in some ways are inherently divisive: Team A versus Team B,” Tyler said. “But pretty much everyone gets aboard the democracy sausage. It’s nice to be the one thing that is unifying about the day and can support the local community.”
Over the past decade, Tyler said, the food on offer has multiplied. The website now allows people to upload information on their stalls, with icons representing sausage sizzles, baked goods, vegetarian options and even halal food. One stall this year is offering homemade kombucha. Another is advertising vegan dal.
“It’s gone from being, like, ‘Let’s just chuck some snags on the barbie’ to ‘What can we offer to differentiate ourselves?’ ” Tyler said.
That points to another distinguishing feature of Australian democracy: Voters may cast a ballot anywhere within their state or territory on election day. For community groups in need of funds, it’s may the best sausage win.
Cookies named after former Labor Party leader Bill Shorten at a food stall in Melbourne.
At Footscray City Primary School in Melbourne, the offerings will include democracy sausages as well as baked goods, many of them puns on politicians’ names. One organizer said the volunteers hoped to sell 1,000 sausages — roughly 120 pounds of meat — to raise $3,500 toward refurbishing the school’s entrance.
In the Outback, the sausage and cake competition is somewhat less fierce, Alisha Moody said. She’ll be slinging democracy sausages at her kids’ school in Quilpie, a town of around 600 people in remote Queensland. A disappointing turnout in 2019 has inspired a shake-up this time around, with her parental association adding tea and breakfast rolls in the hope of enticing more morning voters. Among the new menu items is the “ScoMo,” named after Prime Minister Scott Morrison, featuring onion, sausage, bacon, cheese andegg. Quilpie is the most remote entry on Tyler’s map: a lonely sausage and cupcake symbol in an otherwise cholesterol-free expanse. The food stall offers far-flung people a chance to catch up, Moody said.You’ll always end up standing there chatting for a bit, you know, discussing the weather and the floods,” she said. “So, there is definitely that element of community to it.”
But the number of sausage-seekers has dropped over the years as postal voting has grown, Moody said. In 2019, about 40 percent of the roughly 17 million Australians enrolled to vote cast their ballots early, either by mail or in person. That number is expected to rise again this year.
“What that does mean is fewer people will be turning out on polling day itself,” Gauja said. “So that whole spectacle of election day as a community event is under threat.”
One of the many democracy sausages sampled by political scientist Anika Gauja in 2019.
Gauja is doing her best to document the meaty phenomenon while it lasts. Her plan on Saturday is to compare the food offerings in the Sydney electorates represented by Morrison and his challenger, Labor leader Anthony Albanese.Like politics, democracy sausages inspire strong opinions. Some Australians prefer bread rolls. Others, Gauja among them, consider that a travesty. And pity the poor foreigner who confuses a democracy sausage for an American hot dog.
“I’m a real traditionalist when it comes to the democracy sausage,” Gauja said. “For me, the quality of the sausage is paramount. I insist on it being between either one or two slices of white bread. No bread rolls. I think the ratio of sausage to bread is really, really important. I think onions definitely have to be there. If they’re not an option, then that’s a subpar sausage sizzle.”
Given that I work with a number of far-leftists, I can assure you that many people genuinely supported Bernie Sanders' run for the democratic nomination, and still do.
Reading back through the various twitter streams from the 2020 caucuses, you can clearly see a trend in which folks started out being very pro-Sanders and pro-Warren, and predicting that Biden wouldn't be able to cross the threshold. Then, after Biden won the nomination, the tone changed dramatically, to one of "Well, he's not who I'd have wanted, be we have to vote for him anyway in order to keep bad orange man from remaining in office."
81 million of 'em, apparently. That's a lot of bros.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news Mr Perez, but (one of) your girlfriend(s) just got engaged. Sorry no linky but I'm still on ship so Internet sucks. Wonder how many crazed liberal babies she'll push out?
I'm trying to imagine the personality of a person who would be engaged to AOC.
But who knows... I was also once engaged to a petite brown women with mental health issues. They have a power which alters your judgement and perception, and allows them to latch onto you and drain your precious life force.
"A retired Buffalo police officer, who was working as a security guard at the store, confronted the gunman and shot him. Authorities said the gunman was hit, but his tactical gear prevented injury."
I wouldn't be surprised to see new regulations surrounding body armor. This is such a specific thing to report on.
In many states it's already a crime to commit a crime while wearing body armor. But it will be one more pointless talking point to wring their hands over and say "we have to do something about this". And in the end, it's just as useless as "gun control" in deterring actual criminals.
And those have also been increasing over time at a more or less constant rate, regardless of the hat-color of the president.
The chart for immigration statistics looks pretty similar. The little sections of wall made for good PR photos, but didn't actually accomplish a reduction in illegal immigration. Oh, and We the People paid for 100% of those wall sections, not Mexico.
To see the change, you have to go back, not just a few years, but rather to 1965: 1965 Immigration act
(scraped)
The act put an end to long-standing national-origin quotas that favored those from northern and western Europe.
Lesley KennedyAug 12, 2019 When the U.S. Congress passed—and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law—the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, the move was largely seen as symbolic.
"The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants,” lead supporter Sen. Edward “Ted” Kennedy (D-Mass.) told the Senate during debate. “It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.”
That sentiment was echoed by Johnson, who, upon signing the act on October 3, 1965, said the bill would not be revolutionary: “It does not affect the lives of millions … It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives or add importantly to either our wealth or our power.”
But the act—also known as the Hart-Celler Act after its sponsors, Sen. Philip Hart (D-Mich.) and Rep. Emanuel Celler (D-N.Y.)—put an end to long-standing national-origin quotas that favored those from northern and western Europe and led to a significant immigration demographic shift in America. Since the act was passed, according to the Pew Research Center, immigrants living in America have more than quadrupled, now accounting for nearly 14 percent of the population.
The 1965 Act Aimed to Eliminate Race Discrimination in Immigration
In 1960, Pew notes, 84 percent of U.S. immigrants were born in Europe or Canada; 6 percent were from Mexico, 3.8 percent were from South and East Asia, 3.5 percent were from Latin America and 2.7 percent were from other parts of the world. In 2017, European and Canadian immigrants totaled 13.2 percent, while Mexicans totaled 25.3 percent, other Latin Americans totaled 25.1 percent, Asians totaled 27.4 percent and other populations totaled 9 percent.
The 1965 act has to be understood as a result of the civil rights movement, and the general effort to eliminate race discrimination from U.S. law, says Gabriel “Jack” Chin, immigration law professor at University of California, Davis and co-editor of The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act: Legislating a New America.
Kennedys Saw Immigration Reform as Part of Civil Rights Movement
Immigration reform was also a personal project of John F. Kennedy, Chin notes, whose pamphlet written as a senator was published after his assassination as the book A Nation of Immigrants, and argued for the elimination of the National Origins Quota System in place since 1921.
Ted Kennedy, along with Attorney General and Sen. Robert Kennedy (D-N.Y.), were both proponents of the bill, in part to honor their brother and also because it was consistent with their general interest in civil rights and international cold war politics, Chin adds.
“I think every sensible person in 1965 knew that the sources of immigration would change,” Chin says. “The more fundamental change, and the more fundamental policy, was the articulation by many legislators that it simply did not matter from where an immigrant came; each person would be evaluated as an individual. That kind of argument was novel, but consistent with the anti-racism of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
The act, Edward Kennedy argued during the Senate floor debate, went to the “very central ideals of our country.”
“Our streets may not be paved with gold, but they are paved with the promise that men and women who live here—even strangers and new newcomers—can rise as fast, as far as their skills will allow, no matter what their color is, no matter what the place of their birth,” he said.
Changes Introduced by the Immigration Act of 1965
Among the key changes brought by the Hart-Celler Act:
Quotas based on nation of origin were abolished. For the first time since the National Origins Quota system went into effect in 1921, national origin was no longer a barrier to immigration. “With the end of preferences for northern and western Europeans, immigrants were selected based on individual merit rather than race or national origin,” Chin says. “Accordingly, there were many more immigrants from Asia, Africa and other parts of the world which had traditionally been discriminated against.” The act also established new immigration policies that looked at reuniting families and giving priority to skilled laborers and professionals.
It restricted immigration from Mexico and Central and South America. According to Chin, there were no numerical limitations on immigration until 1921, but Western Hemisphere immigration had been exempt. “Based on the Monroe Doctrine—and the desire for the free flow of labor, especially agricultural labor—there had been no cap under the National Origins Quota System,” he says. “The 1965 act established a cap on Western Hemisphere immigration for the first time. It also followed on the unwise elimination of the [guest worker] Bracero Program in 1964. These decisions disrupted traditional patterns of labor movement and agricultural production in the United States in ways we are still grappling with.”
It changed immigration demographics and increased immigrant numbers. According to a report by the Pew Research Center, in 1965, 84 percent of the U.S. population consisted of non-Hispanic whites; in 2015, that number was 62 percent. “Without any post-1965 immigration, the nation’s racial and ethnic composition would be very different today: 75 percent white, 14 percent black, 8 percent Hispanic and less than 1 percent Asian,” the report finds.
Comparing 1965 to 2015, the Hispanic population rose from 4 percent to 18 percent; and Asians grew from 1 percent to 6 percent. “This fast-growing immigrant population also has driven the share of the U.S. population that is foreign-born from 5 percent in 1965 to 14 percent today and will push it to a projected record 18 percent in 2065,” the report continues, noting that no racial or ethnic group will claim a majority of the U.S. population.
05-19-2022, 03:11 PM
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When the U.S. Congress passed—and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law—the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, the move was largely seen as symbolic. 
