Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

[Tom Sawyer]

This sentiment did not sit well with fellow Fox News contributor Dan Bongino, who told Rivera “to say she has a heart… socialism doesn’t have a heart! Socialism kills people, Geraldo!”

Socialism doesn't kill people. People kill people.

No? How many people has socialism killed under Stalin, Pol Pot, Mugabe, Chavez, Mao, and the dozens of other socialist tin pot regimes?

Zero. People kill people. Don't let big government take away our socialism!

 

[untermensche]

No? How many people has socialism killed under Stalin, Pol Pot, Mugabe, Chavez, Mao, and the dozens of other socialist tin pot regimes?

Chavez?

He killed nobody.

And calling brutal dictators "socialism" is a game for idiots.

US capitalism killed millions in Vietnam and Cambodia and attacked Iraq for no good reason leading to many deaths.

The US is killing people non-stop.

It is one of the sickest regimes to ever exist.

 

[George S]

1980

Regrettably, the myths persist to this day, nearly 40 years...
[YOUTUBE]xNc-xhH8kkk[/YOUTUBE]

 

[lpetrich]

Scoop: Ethics Group To File House Complaint On Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitter Use | The Daily Caller

A Washington, D.C.-based ethics group is claiming that New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s social media usage violates House ethics rules against using taxpayer resources for political purposes.

Ocasio-Cortez’s political Instagram account contains direct links to her House Instagram account and includes a link for political contributions, alongside posts of official video footage on the House floor, according to a complaint Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT) plans to file Thursday with the Office of Congressional Ethics. The group claims these actions violate House ethics rules.

Another bit of the right-wing playbook: endless harassment with investigations with dubious substance at best. Bill Clinton suffered that, and Hillary also.

Conservatives Are Bizarrely Claiming AOC Wants to Take Your Burger Away - VICE

It can be an effective tactic because declarations about murdered babies and the seizure of meat attract coverage (like this article), rile up the base, and are easier to make than nuanced arguments about Democrats' real positions. It also puts Democrats on the defensive, forced to explain that wait, no, they don't want to end air travel, they just want to build high-speed rail because blah blah blah—as the saying goes, when you're explaining, you're losing.

 

[Elixir]

...calling brutal dictators "socialism" is a game for idiots.

Yeah, well - it's all they got. They can't argue against roads, power grids, social security etc., so they NEED to make false equivalences. They're not (all) idiots, they're simply in an untenable position that cannot be supported by honest or logical argument.

 

[lpetrich]

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "Apparently the answer is or close to: $0… " noting Sandhya Raman on Twitter: ".@AOC is asking ONDCP director Carroll how much the money is being transferred to the national public health emergency declared for the opioid epidemic compared to what has been proposed for the emergency declaration for the wall."

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "Boycotting cookies that teach little girls leadership skills to own the libs nice job I’ll take 10 … "
with a screenshot of "Conservative calls for cookie boycott because AOC used to be a Girl Scout"
That is a rather disappointing sort of reference, but I did the research, and I discovered that it was real:
AOC was a Girl Scout … just say no to the cookies - WND
Author Jane Chastain complained bitterly that the Girl Scouts is now a bunch of left-wing extremists, writing

The Girl Scouts were an important part of my formative years, and I sold hundreds of boxes of these cookies myself, so I considered it payback, paying it forward so to speak. Not anymore.

...
In fact, the Girl Scouts are celebrating the victory won by their alums in the 2018 midterms on its website, beginning with their star, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who attributes much of her success to what she learned as part of this organization. Now Girl Scout alums make up 72 percent of female senators and 60 percent of the women in the 116th Congress. Although the website tries to strike a bipartisan tone, it is no accident that, among this year’s freshmen, Carol Miller is the only Republican, and she is much older, 68, than the rest. Her training in scouting was well before the feminist takeover that occurred in 1970.

...
So before you decide to embrace an International Women’s Day celebration or buy the cookies, ask yourself, “Will the country be better off with more representatives like the young socialist Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez?”

If not, it’s a good time to start your diet.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: " Desperado Sittin' in an old Monte Carlo/ Oh, dear desperado... Yeah, I don't wanna be alone (To be fair, I’m not *totally* alone at this hearing. There are 10 Dems, 2 GOP here out of ~60 members).… https://t.co/mq0KX9osMR" noting Bartlett Naylor on Twitter: "Why is @aoc at consumer protection hearing, almost alone? Because she isn't raising money from large donors… "
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "(To also be fair, sometimes committee hearings overlap and you have to choose which one you’re going to. Happened to me earlier today - had to leave this hearing earlier so I could ask questions on Oversight about the opioid crisis)"

 

[Loren Pechtel]

No? How many people has socialism killed under Stalin, Pol Pot, Mugabe, Chavez, Mao, and the dozens of other socialist tin pot regimes?

Chavez?

He killed nobody.

Same as Mao, he's killed an awful lot of people by fucking up the economy.

And calling brutal dictators "socialism" is a game for idiots.

All supposed "Socialist" leaders have in time shown they are brutal dictators.

 

[angelo]

AOC should have a satisfied smirk on her face after chasing away Amazon and around 25.000 jobs with it!

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273064/ocasio-cortezs-venezuela-hudson-daniel-greenfield

 

[Arctish]

AOC should have a satisfied smirk on her face after chasing away Amazon and around 25.000 jobs with it!

You really think she's some kind of Superwoman, don't you?

You think she singlehandedly stopped Amazon in it's tracks, and that the folks in New York who objected to the plan and the ginormous tax breaks had nothing to do with it.

 

[untermensche]

Amazon and it's near slave jobs.

New York can do better.

If it can't then the future is black for New Yorkers.

 

[lpetrich]

AFR on Twitter: "For those curious, 61.6% of @AOC campaign contributions were $200 or less, according to our analysis with @ceprdc. That's higher than any other Rep currently serving. Read more in this @aidachavez story. #SmallDollarSuperstar [url]https://t.co/YQgZsYzwbA… https://t.co/himYkk2YGp"[/url]

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "These disturbing, authoritarian practices are what we’re funding with every dollar given to DHS & ICE with 0 accountability … https://t.co/LVaAfxITnk" noting Matt Pearce on Twitter: "Wow. Big scoop by @nbcsandiego: The Trump administration created a "secret database of activists, journalists, and social media influencers tied to the migrant caravan and in some cases, placed alerts on their passports." https://t.co/n1l4uDt300"

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "Hidden gem: Rep. @katieporteroc on Financial Services She consistently delivers incredible lines of questioning (and frequently adds a dash of humor). … https://t.co/yworO6xXWK" noting AFR on Twitter: "The DIRECTOR OF THE BUREAU MEANT TO #PROTECTCONSUMERS cannot even BALLPARK the APR of a short-term payday loan. So *how* does @CFPB Dir. Kraninger expect consumers to? #ProtectConsumers #StopTheDebtTrap… https://t.co/eAYUMzRgIM"

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "Paul Manafort getting such little jail time for such serious crimes lays out for the world how it’s almost impossible for rich people to go to jail for the same amount of time as someone who is lower income. In our current broken system, “justice” isn’t blind. It’s bought.… https://t.co/jCqC0KRosQ" noting Ari Melber on Twitter: "Paul Manafort’s lenient 4-year sentence — far below the recommended 20 years despite extensive felonies and post-conviction obstruction — is a reminder of the blatant inequities in our justice system that we all know about, because they reoccur every week in courts across America" Compare The Last Word on Twitter: "After testifying she didn't know a felony conviction made her ineligible to cast a ballot, Texas woman gets 5 years in prison for voting illegally [url]https://t.co/90Sfcb4Mcv… https://t.co/HizDoPyDC9"[/url]

 

[lpetrich]

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "In case you saw the conspiracy theory running around, conservative groups have now taken to spamming us by filing bogus ethics complaints so that Fox News can report on “alleged,” untrue scandals. This is how the misinformation machine works, folks. https://t.co/Gi5PhIJ7Jo" noting A conservative group alleges Ocasio-Cortez and her allies ran a PAC scam. But there's no evidence of wrongdoing.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's congressional campaign has come under scrutiny in recent days for what a conservative group has alleged is a massive violation of campaign finance law.

...
David Mitrani, an attorney representing Ocasio-Cortez's campaign and the related organizations named in the FEC complaint, pushed back strongly on the reports in a statement Wednesday, saying that the entities "have at all times been conducted fully in compliance with federal campaign finance laws."

...
Campaign finance experts, meanwhile, told NBC News that while the structure of her campaign and its vendors might be confusing, there's no evidence of some kind of million-dollar scam as has been alleged in news reports.

Then a detailed discussion of the campaign organizations that some fellow activists had created and run.

“Describing a disbursement for strategy consulting is permissible, but only if that's what the disbursement was actually for. There may be a violation here,” Ryan said. “However, the FEC would likely treat this violation as very minor, particularly if the rest of the information provided for that transaction was accurate.”

Ryan said a small fine could result from such a violation, not jail time.

Travelgate to Furnituregate: a guide to the Clinton scandals of the 90s | US news | The Guardian Many of them were manufactured by right-wingers who violated their cherished principles so that they can have something to be outraged about.

• Travelgate
• Vince Foster's suicide
• Filegate
• Whitewater
• Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky and the impeachment
• Furnituregate

I would add the siege of Waco.

Travelgate is a clear example of what I have in mind. In getting outraged about it, right-wingers went against their cherished principles of objection to wasteful government spending, objection to government bureaucrats, and the absolute sovereignty of employers over their workplaces.

More recently, the right wing has done that with Hillary Clinton:

• The 2012 Benghazi attacks
• Her private e-mail server

For Barack Obama, the right wing got worked up over:

• Birtherism
• His use of a teleprompter in his speeches
• The expense of his family's vacations

 

[untermensche]

They also complained about how much golf Obama played.

Hypocrisy thy name is the Republican party.

 

[Derec]

The question that represents the elephant in the room and is ignored is : How has is it been possible that Islam has been able to ilfritate the very corridors of the American government?

Mass migration is one reason. Many thousands of Somalis moved to US over the last three decades, and they tend to have a lot of children. That was done to help refugees, but these migrants were not sufficiently screened and vetted, so that many Islamists came in as well.
But that is not the whole reason. Muslims are not a majority in the 5th district, but there are a whole lot of islamophilic Democrats there who believe not voting for a Muslim makes you "racist".

By the way, Minneapolis is number one terrorist recruiting district in the country, thanks to the Somali community.
She also tried to get leniency for Somalis who got caught trying to join ISIS.

In other words. Is America headed in the same direction as Europe has in submitting to the death cult of Islam?

Quite possibly, at least in certain pockets like Minneapolis.

 

[repoman]

She gave the Democrats leverage on her by being at the least foolish about campaign financing.

Hopefully based Ilhan Omar has not done any of this, keep on sticking it to the AIPAC scumbags! They really do cry out in pain as they strike you!

 

[lpetrich]

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's mother tells how she hopes her daughter marries her longtime boyfriend | Daily Mail Online

EXCLUSIVE: 'God played quite a joke on me with this politics stuff!' The privacy-loving mother of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez whips up lasagna as she tells how she had to flee New York because of high taxes and gushes about wedding bells for her daughter

• U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's mother Blanca Ocasio-Cortez has spoken exclusively to DailyMail.com about her Democrat star daughter
• Blanca Ocasio-Cortez – BOC – is still settling down in Eustis, Florida, a small city in the far suburbs of Orlando with her mother Clotilde, 78, and a rescue dog
• She said: 'After my husband died the family went through tough times. I was cleaning houses in the morning and working as a secretary in the afternoon'
• 'We moved from The Bronx to Yorktown Heights, but it was difficult making ends meet. I was skipping mortgage payments and we almost lost the house twice'
• Early on, AOC didn't show signs she'd get into politics - except that she talked incessantly and itched to show off her brains, her mother said
• 'She wasn't raised to be a socialist,' Mrs. Ocasio-Cortez said. 'That's not how Puerto Ricans are. She's a democratic socialist, and it's very different'
• Blanca was particularly put off by the controversy surrounding AOC's move into D.C. high-rise, saying 'that building isn't even that expensive by D.C. and New York standards'
• The mother-of-two said her new Trump-supporting Florida neighbors don't know she is AOC's mother, saying she doesn't like the limelight for her family

...
'Her dad and I were preparing for Alexandria's birth and still picking names,' the 56-year-old mom of two said in an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com. 'And he came up with ''Alexandria.'' I thought about it for a while and I said: ''Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. That sounds very powerful. That'll be her name.'''

Her name is a variant of "Alexandra", the feminine version of "Alexander". It means "helper/defender of men" in Greek, and it has been very popular over the centuries. It goes back a *long* way, some 3200 years to Mycenaean Greece, where we find someone named a-re-ka-sa-da-ra in Mycenae (a-re-ka-sa-da-ra-qe | Minoan Linear A & Mycenaean Linear B).

'We had a great life there,' Blanca said. 'Alexandria was very social, so she always had a bunch of girls over. She took over the shed in the backyard. She cleaned it up, put up curtains and photos and made it look nice, and that was like a clubhouse for her and her friends.'

Already as a young teenager, mom said, AOC got a political education at the dinner table, something to balance out the fact she was only involved in sports at school.

'We had a lot of conversations at the dinner table among ourselves about the issues of the day,' Blanca said. 'We'd talk about (President Barack) Obama or healthcare or elections.'

Early on, Alexandria didn't show signs she'd get into politics - except that she talked incessantly and itched to show off her brains, her mother said.

'When I took her to her pre-K interview, she didn't let me talk much,' Blanca said. 'She was going on and on about knowing the alphabet and being able to count.'

Once in high school, Alexandria became a voracious reader of books about history and war and biographies of historic figures.

BOC moved to a suburb of Orlando, Florida, and bought a $87,000 house on a road that dead-ends at a cemetery. Drug dealers have been known to work nearby. But she pays much less in property taxes: $600/yr instead of $10,000/yr back in NYC.

Blanca also shared a strange story to illustrate the serendipitous nature of AOC's fast ride to Washington, D.C.

'One of the last things she did with her dad before he died was sit with him and watch a Star Trek: Voyager episode on TV,' Blanca explained. 'In one scene, Captain Janeway (a character played by Kate Mulgrew) appears and my husband, who could no longer talk, pointed at the captain then at Alexandria, and back and forth, to say to her he thought she'd be like Captain Janeway one day, someone in charge.

'We didn't think anything of it. Then, who showed up on the stage of Alexandria's last rally before the general election in the Bronx 10 years later?'

Blanca said Kate Mulgrew showed up unannounced and unaware of the significance of her character to AOC.

'My daughter was speechless,' Blanca says. 'For once.'

BOC, as she may be called, defended her daughter's choice of a DC highrise with rents of some $5000/month. That is because that place has amenities that make it unnecessary to get out very much, thus giving her some privacy and security.

She insists that her daughter is a democratic socialist.

'She wasn't raised to be a socialist,' Blanca said. 'That's not how Puerto Ricans are. That's not what we do. Socialists are in Cuba or Venezuela. Besides, anyone who tries to help little people like me is branded a socialist.

'She's a democratic socialist, and it's very different. They focus on working people's needs. They're not about the rich or big corporations. Democratic socialists are about what Democrats were supposed to be about, but Democrats are not doing a good enough job.'

She hopes that her daughter will marry her long-time boyfriend.

 

[Arctish]

The question that represents the elephant in the room and is ignored is : How has is it been possible that Islam has been able to ilfritate the very corridors of the American government?

It's not infiltration. There's nothing sneaky or subversive about it. It's the normal, natural result of religious freedom in a Constitutional Republic that guarantees the right to openly worship whatever gods you believe in, separates Church and State, and forbids religious tests for government employment or holding office.

You can express your religious views here but you can't impose them on anyone else, which means you can't prevent people from choosing Muslims as their Representatives in Congress no matter how much you despise Islam.

 

[lpetrich]

Blanca Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria’s mom, was utterly charming in her interview with a Daily Mail reporter. - "The Daily Mail tried to spring a “gotcha” interview on AOC’s mom. The result was extremely wholesome."

After discussing the Daily Mail's attempt to pin scandals on her,

But the site hasn’t quite settled on an argument against her. Is she corrupt? Entitled? Fancier than she claims? So far, nothing has seemed to stick. With the Mail’s tabloid DNA and populist-conservative ethos, editors surely hoped for something meaty when it got Blanca Ocasio-Cortez talking. Instead it got a hardworking middle-aged woman making semi-homemade lasagna in her kitchen, a jar of Ragu on the counter and a familiarly charming smile on her face.

“All Sizzle but No Steak” - How Ocasio-Cortez is upending the usual sexist scripts for talking about female politicians’ looks.

... While the left certainly isn’t exempt, the response from the right has been notable not just for its frenzied ubiquity, but for the gendered stink of the efforts to undermine her.

... Discussion of a female politician’s appearance has long been used to automatically delegitimize her. Whether the content was flattering or cruel, the fact that her looks were discussed at all made her seem ineffective and insubstantial to the public.

,,,
Max Tani observed that “AOC has accomplished something abnormal in the Trump era: Getting cable news networks to talk about policy not directly related to Trump or some legislation on the verge of passing.” The effect isn’t limited to media organizations and politicians. She’s getting everyday Americans to debate actual policy.

Author Lili Loofbourow then got into the rise of Donald Trump, noting that he is not exactly what a conservative might want -- he is not exactly a Mitt Romney figure.

It’s that his charisma made it possible for a subset of Americans to openly air grievances they couldn’t before without seeming uncouth: how immigrants are lazy, job-stealing criminals, for instance. Something similar is happening with the rise of Ocasio-Cortez, I think: The combination of her personal and political appeal seems to be channeling the unspoken (and unspeakable) feelings of many Americans.

Like many people's economic vulnerability.

People are tired of being blamed for failing to haul themselves out of their own unlucky financial circumstances. As someone who did just that, she’s in a position to acknowledge that the unsayable sacrifices people make within a flawed economic framework might constitute a problem that’s worth fixing. Or at least discussing.

That’s due in part to the simple accessibility of her story: Her mother scrubbed toilets to send her to school. They moved to a better neighborhood, got a house. Her father died. Her mother had to scrub toilets again. Now that woman’s daughter is a congresswoman—educated, with a degree in economics and a giant platform of her own making. It’s exactly the sort of meritocratic story the right claims to love. (Even though they don’t seem to actually think it’s possible; the number of attempts conservatives have made to “debunk” parts of her biography suggests that they find the American dream literally unbelievable).

Consider Oprah Winfrey. She is the richest American black woman ever, and she is one of the richest black women anywhere in the world. But she started out very poor, much poorer than what many right-wingers brag about, and gradually worked her way up. Yet the right wing does not like her very much.

LL then notes that right-wingers whine that attacks on her get called racist and sexist. But there is a simple solution: don't make such attacks. Though one right-winger's full critique of her ideas is “Socialism with a smile; fascism among friends, Venezuela meets vegan.” (Greg Gutfield of Fox News) But some right-wingers insist on doing so, like Ed Rollins calling her a "little girl" and Candace Owens saying about her that she is “constantly infantiliz[ing] her voice to sound like a toddler so that journalists don’t critique her dangerous ideas.” Some right-wingers have tried to argue that she is a fake, like the Gateway Pundit getting worked up how the "Yorktown Elitist" and "Bronx Hoaxer" once went under the nickname "Sandy".

 

[lpetrich]

The Right likes to criticize AOC as ignorant, and that she is a "mini-Maduro", after Venezuela's president.

Even some of Ocasio-Cortez’s ideological opponents acknowledge that her proposals—unlike Trump’s, say—do actually address fiscal questions that most politicians don’t bother with. A guy who’d recently “liked” a photo posted by Trump adviser Stephen Miller tweeted, “I can’t believe I’m tweeting this. I can’t. But doesn’t @AOC deserve a tiny tiny bit of credit for being honest about what taxes would need to be to pay for stuff? Rather than promising stuff without explaining how to pay for it.”

Such grudging admission is common among some parts of the Right, like an editor of the National Review stating that she is a nice target because she seems “to embody aspects of the other side’s unbridled id.” But she isn't exactly talking about sending business leaders to Alaskan prison camps.

Though the Right wants her to be some Sarah Palin of the Left, she has been more "effective and focused", as LL puts it, than SP ever was.

She’s fun-loving and vivacious when that’s appropriate, but she also speaks in ways that are—or at least feel—unvarnished and pained and sincere. What those right-leaning readers are correcting for, I think—with nuance you don’t see much online—is a disjunction between conservative attacks on AOC as the figure they need her to be and the person she actually is.

Then how attacking her for some youthful dancing had backfired rather miserably.

Ocasio-Cortez—and in this she really does seem kind of exceptional—doesn’t appear to be a liar. She seems sincere, and her mistakes (which are real and worth discussing) seem genuine. Compared with Paul Ryan’s lies (a brief sample), they don’t seem like efforts to deceive. Nor is she remotely out of step with the level of knowledge—or the degree of accuracy—her male colleagues in Congress bring to the job. It is a problem that our politicians do not give us accurate information. It is not a problem that has anything to do with AOC’s youth, or experience, or femininity.

...
Critics will keep trying to cast her as the scary Latino, the ditzy girl, the beautiful ignoramus, the vicious Communist, the resentful victim, the spoiled daughter of privilege, or the liberal Palin. But Ocasio-Cortez—with her youth, industry, intelligence, and ambition—has made the bankruptcy of those tropes easier to recognize.

 

[Derec]

Lpetrich, do you have a crush on AOC or something? You keep gushing about her.