Over time, the older undying would take themselves out of the labor pool via the accumulation of wealth and power, leaving the younger folks and the normal folks to the labor pool. At some point in time, there will be a tipping point where the undying will outnumber the rest, and the rest may not be so enthusiastic about working for them, so the likely recourse will be slavery or indentured servitude.
Look at it this way. What do US farmers do in response to labor scarcity with crop pickers? They don't raise labor rates. They import foreign (illegal) workers that work below market rate and have fewer legal recourses for unsafe working conditions.
When the Spanish landed in the new world and needed people to work the sugar plantations, they didn't put fliers out in the cities of Europe. They imported slaves from Africa. Same thing with the silver mines in Mexico, except there they used native slave labor.
Further clarification: a lot of other things going on at the time of the Black Death leading to the ultimate end of serfdom. The re-urbanization of Europe and the knowledge brought back from the Crusades was much more important than the Black Death (which, if anything, set back the aspirations of the common man).
The problem is, serfdom itself originally arose from labor scarcity during the Roman empire. There were a lot of other things going on at the time leading to the ultimate end of serfdom. Labor scarcity wasn't really one of them.
Why in the world would I want to shoot you? I might disdain your politics and hold you personally in contempt, but hey, it's a free country. Putting people who disagree with you up against a wall and shooting them is much more your political domain than mine.
I said that I would like to see it applied correctly, not in the completely perverted way that the courts have been applying it under long and strong pressure from the arms industry.
Yeah, because when a good 75-80% of the American public thinks that the 2nd Amendment gives individuals the right to own firearms, it's really a perversion when the Federal appellate and SCOTUS judges finally get around to agreeing, never mind what the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers say (which again, strongly support the individual right to keep and bear arms). You fucking nitwit dick sucking communist.
You're seriously fucking retarded. You say I'm lying about your stance on the 2nd Amendment, and then you go on to basically restate what I said as your actual position.
But I'm also not saying that Democrats aren't crooked.
Jesus H Fucking Christ, Hell must've just frozen over. I'm surprised you aren't retarded enough to claim just that.
That list I pointed to has many times more the indicted and convicted felons than you just posted
Maybe because I justed posted the ones from the Clinton administration. But you're probably too fucking stupid to understand that a larger pool will net more fish than a smaller pool and therefore think your larger list is somehow proof of greater criminality.
And you people lied us into the Iraq War, and all the other catastrophes that have brought this country so low
Yeah, and Johnson lied us into the Vietnam war, and Clinton lied us into the Kosovar war, and bombed Afghanistan and the Sudan for no other reason than to distract from his little Impeachment. He even bombed Iraq during Desert Fox to shore up his ratings. So lying, and misusing force doesn't exactly seem to be just a Republican affair, you inbred socialist fucktard.
But yours does include people who the Republican Congress and many Nixon/Reagan/Bush appointed partisan judges convicted for political reasons.
No, I don't selectively edit the Constitution. You're just lying.
Sure you do. You've stated repeatedly in the past you want to do away with the 2nd Amendment and that the Heller Supreme Court was unfortunate. Or am I "lying"...again?
My point is that Republicans are worse.
That may be your point, but you are...wrong. The Clinton administration was a demonstration of naked criminality in office. Witness tampering? Check. Witness coercion? Check. Illegally accessing the FBI files of political opponents for the purposes of blackmail? Check. Attacking countries to distract away from domestic problems? Check. Taking bribes in exchange for pardons? Check. Taking illegal campaign contributions from foreign donors tied to the Chinese military? Check. Taking illegal campaign contributions from foreign donors tied to the dictator in Indonesia? Check. Perjury under oath? Check.
CRIME STATS
- Number of individuals and businesses associated with the Clinton machine who have been convicted of or pleaded guilty to crimes: 47 - Number of these convictions during Clinton's presidency: 33 - Number of indictments/misdemeanor charges: 61 - Number of congressional witnesses who have pleaded the Fifth Amendment, fled the country to avoid testifying, or (in the case of foreign witnesses) refused to be interviewed: 122
Yeah, those big bad Republicans are soooo much worse.
Doc, you are just a political hack douche bag carrying water for the socialist, elitist Democrats. And one that can't even get his facts straight. Why don't you just come out and admit it? Acceptance is the first step to recovery, although your condition may be congenital.
The right to a means of effective self defense is the most basic, fundamental right there is. The "liberal" (aka leftist) obsession with gun control is nothing other than a naked attempt to subvert this right and leave the populace completely dependent on the government for their protection (and livelyhood, and values). A free society with the means of self defense is anathema to the average leftist, who think people are cattle to be herded and led.
A lot of the rest of us find the idea of the death penalty to be extremely immoral, especially when its application is racially biased. We also see it as immoral to start wars, give guns of any sort to anyone that wants them, ignore the economic plight of our neighbors, and keep consenting adults from being happy in any way they choose as long as it doesn't directly affect our lives (nope, being disgusted by it doesn't count).
It's interesting that liberals would object to the death penalty for murderers, but have no problem murdering unborn children. Quite a few, in fact, support partial birth abortions (aka intact dilation and evacuation) through the 3rd trimester. Obama is one such liberal.
As for starting wars, Iraq is merely a continuation of a previous war, and the war in Afghanistan wasn't started by us.
Giving guns to "any sort that wants them"...I love how liberals selectively edit out explicit parts of the Constitution they don't like by judicial fiat, while creating, from whole cloth, fully incorporated rights from thin air. Luckily, this time, you guys could only find 4 traitorous scumbag Supreme Court Justices to decide a right wasn't really a right.
As to ignoring the economic plight of your neighbors, you're right. You don't ignore it. You try to steal every damn nickel and dime from your neighbors so that you can give it away to prove how generous you are with other people's money.
FWIW, I'm libertarian in most ways
Bullshit. Based on what you wrote prior to this, you're just as perverse as any moralizing far right TV evangelist. You just have a different set of values you want to impose on everyone else around you.
Oh yeah, your advocated version of democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. We already have a society where 50% of the workers in the US effectively have no net Federal tax liability and the "rich" pay the vast majority of all income taxes. It's hard to get more unfair than that. From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs, eh comrade?
Just because Bush is worse than Nixon doesn't mean Nixon wasn't really bad. He was.
And so was Johnson, and so was Clinton, and you can almost assuredly throw Reagan and Bush 41 in there as well.
But hey, aren't you the guy that selectively edits the parts of the Constitution you don't like? So what exactly is your point other than "I don't like Republicans?", because it doesn't appear to be governance according to the Constitution.
Sorry, wealth disparity doesn't explain it. There are more poor whites than poor blacks. Blacks only make up 13% of the US population. Yet they account for, as I said above, over half the violent crime in the US...meaning their offender rate is far above the norm even if you control for income. Now, it's probably due to a whole host of factors including urbanization, partial exclusion from mainstream society, common acceptance of a criminal and violent lifestyle within the community, etc, but there is no simple lever like "ban guns" or "end poverty" for violent crime (especially the non-economic motivated kind like rape).
Hey look, it's the elitist yet socialist Doc Ruby piping in again about what the proles should and shouldn't have.
More important than the right to overthrow our government is the very basic English common law right to self-defense. Firearms are the most useful means of self-defense against the depredations of violent crime. Harsh words, pocket knifes, emergency whistles, Brinks home security, and calling 911 much less so. The State has no obligation to defend you (as upheld by the Supreme Court), self-defense is a personal responsibility. Given that, the State is obligated to give you sufficient means to do so.
Just look at most European countries. Most European countries don't have lower violent crime rates because they have stricter gun laws, but because they have relatively homogeneous, stable, and older cultures.
The average violent offender in the United States is: a young black male. Blacks commit over 50% of violent crime in the United States. White violent offender rates are much more in line with European norms.
You can't compare societies with different ethnic, religious, age, and cultural makeups and assume that a solution that works great for the Netherlands would work equally well in the United States or elsewhere.
"Some have made the argument, bordering on the frivolous, that only those arms in existence in the 18th century are protected by the Second Amendment. We do not interpret constitutional rights that way. Just as the First Amendment protects modern forms of communications, e.g., Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, 521 U. S. 844, 849 (1997), and the Fourth Amendment applies to modern forms of search, e.g., Kyllo v. United States, 533 U. S. 27, 35â"36 (2001), the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding."
Pretty effectively demolishes the assertion that only muskets and swords are allowed, which the prohibitionist left likes to bring up periodically.
The majority of laws passed these days target law abiding citizens as a means of control rather than crime prevention. Gun control laws are no different.
You must have last checked some time before World War II, then. Most taxpayer money has been spent on the military-industrial complex for the last half century or so, just like Eisenhower warned us would happen. Actually, I looked at FY 2007. And unlike you, I actually looked at the numbers. How retards like you get moderated interesting is amazing. Guess birds of a feather flock together.
Breakdown of the Federal budget in 2007: 17% defense 21% Social Security 14% Medicare 13% Unemployment & Welfare 10% Medicaid.
You can see a nice pretty pie chart that even an idiot like you can read here:
But I'll sum it up for you. 10+13+14+21 = 58% of the budget going to transfer payments while 17% of the budget goes to defense spending, so no, the majority of the Federal budget isn't going to the big bad evil Military Industrial Complex.
They take the money you earn while working for a living and use it for corporate welfare and bailing out rich bastards who gamble and lose, so how long do you think they're gonna watch billions of dollars bouncing around the Interwebz before figuring out a way to dip their collective hand in there too? Last time I checked (which wasn't all that long ago), most tax payer money was being spent on distributions to non-tax paying citizens. You know, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.
They aren't bailing out the banks with your tax money, they are bailing them out with the money left in your wallet in the form of an inflation tax. So you get screwed coming and going.
Which reminds me about McCain's irresponsible position on Iraq. Spend how much over the next 100 years, just because he doesn't want to admit we fucked up? I'm sorry, no. The Iraq war is going to end up costing around $3 trillion. Expensive, yes. A waste, yes. But it's a bit like complaining about second hand cigarette smoke while your house is burning down around you. So Obama saves us $3 trillion on the front end by cutting and running, and transfers $60 trillion more debt to our children and grandchildren. Still doesn't exactly meet the definition of fiscal responsibility.
So what do you think we should do about it? Since we've promised it, we have to deliver right? That is what you are arguing. We can't renege on our promise, we can't do anything about this. We should just sit around and whine and rend our clothes and yell "WHOA IS ME!" Sure we can renege on our promises. And it's all but certain that we will, either through outright bankruptcy or hyper inflation. My point isn't whoa is me, my point is, you can't claim that Obama is somehow more fiscally responsible than Bush or McCain when he isn't proposing anything that positively affects our impending financial implosion. More government programs just means more things we can't afford. But hey, as long as you don't get stuck with the bill, it's responsible I guess.
Interesting. But fanciful, as those predictions are not without a great deal of error. So let me get this straight. You think the numbers generated by the Congressional Budget Office, the Secretary of the Treasury, Nobel laureate economists, Federal Reserve executives, and just about anyone else that's run the numbers are "fanciful"?
If anything, those numbers are hopeless optimistic. Because the Federal government, under Republicans or Democrats, has been unable to restrain itself from promising more and more benefits to more and more people, yet not providing a way of paying for it.
You want to "pay as we go", but we can't pay for what we've already promised. Or rather, we can, but only at a confiscatory (70%+) tax rate. And this is without socialized / single payer national health care, Obama's plan to take another 10 million workers off the tax rolls, expansion of the military (oh yeah, that's in Obama's platform), and various other spending increases Obama's platform would require to implement.
This isn't a piss on Obama post or a McCain is great post. This is a "we've been sold down the river" with empty promises that our children and grand children will be enslaved to pay for so a baby boom generation can retire in some comfort. And there isn't a single damn viable politician on the national stage that's willing to speak up about.
Another good resource is "The Coming Generational Storm" by Kotlikoff and Burns.
Another place to start is the Gokhale-Smetters study commissioned by fired Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill in 2002. The data is out of date since the Prescription Drug Plan wasn't in effect there and has adversely affected the bottom line. They estimated was a $45 trillion shortfall at that point in time.
They also came up with a "Menu of Pain" on how to pay for it. Starting in 2003, you would need to increase Federal income taxes by 69% or increase payroll taxes by 95%, or cut Federal purchases by 106%, or cut Social Security and Medicare by 45% (or some combination of the 4).
If you wait until 2008, your numbers go to 74%, 103%, 115%, and 47% respectively, assuming your net obligations stay the same.
Of course, in the 5 years since, we haven't started, and worse, we've added to our obligations.
The information is out there, put out by reputable government sources and academic sources.
Obama is, by any stretch of the imagination, the most far left candidate that's ever been nominated by a major party. He's not only far to the left of the mainstream of American, he's further left than what the left thinks is the mainstream of America.
He can't run on his legislative accomplishments, because he has none. He was basically in the Senate for 1 year when he started running for President.
He can't run on his voting record or his actual beliefs, because that puts him at odds with the majority of American voters.
What he can run on, however, is the voters beliefs which they then project onto him. In that sense, he's an empty suit. It's brilliantly dishonest. We'll see how long he can pull it off though in a general election.
Slashdot Mirror
Over time, the older undying would take themselves out of the labor pool via the accumulation of wealth and power, leaving the younger folks and the normal folks to the labor pool. At some point in time, there will be a tipping point where the undying will outnumber the rest, and the rest may not be so enthusiastic about working for them, so the likely recourse will be slavery or indentured servitude.
Look at it this way. What do US farmers do in response to labor scarcity with crop pickers? They don't raise labor rates. They import foreign (illegal) workers that work below market rate and have fewer legal recourses for unsafe working conditions.
When the Spanish landed in the new world and needed people to work the sugar plantations, they didn't put fliers out in the cities of Europe. They imported slaves from Africa. Same thing with the silver mines in Mexico, except there they used native slave labor.
Further clarification: a lot of other things going on at the time of the Black Death leading to the ultimate end of serfdom. The re-urbanization of Europe and the knowledge brought back from the Crusades was much more important than the Black Death (which, if anything, set back the aspirations of the common man).
The problem is, serfdom itself originally arose from labor scarcity during the Roman empire. There were a lot of other things going on at the time leading to the ultimate end of serfdom. Labor scarcity wasn't really one of them.
The traditional (historical) recourse to labor scarcity has been slavery or indentured servitude.
Why in the world would I want to shoot you? I might disdain your politics and hold you personally in contempt, but hey, it's a free country. Putting people who disagree with you up against a wall and shooting them is much more your political domain than mine.
I said that I would like to see it applied correctly, not in the completely perverted way that the courts have been applying it under long and strong pressure from the arms industry.
Yeah, because when a good 75-80% of the American public thinks that the 2nd Amendment gives individuals the right to own firearms, it's really a perversion when the Federal appellate and SCOTUS judges finally get around to agreeing, never mind what the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers say (which again, strongly support the individual right to keep and bear arms). You fucking nitwit dick sucking communist.
You're seriously fucking retarded. You say I'm lying about your stance on the 2nd Amendment, and then you go on to basically restate what I said as your actual position.
But I'm also not saying that Democrats aren't crooked.
Jesus H Fucking Christ, Hell must've just frozen over. I'm surprised you aren't retarded enough to claim just that.
That list I pointed to has many times more the indicted and convicted felons than you just posted
Maybe because I justed posted the ones from the Clinton administration. But you're probably too fucking stupid to understand that a larger pool will net more fish than a smaller pool and therefore think your larger list is somehow proof of greater criminality.
And you people lied us into the Iraq War, and all the other catastrophes that have brought this country so low
Yeah, and Johnson lied us into the Vietnam war, and Clinton lied us into the Kosovar war, and bombed Afghanistan and the Sudan for no other reason than to distract from his little Impeachment. He even bombed Iraq during Desert Fox to shore up his ratings. So lying, and misusing force doesn't exactly seem to be just a Republican affair, you inbred socialist fucktard.
But yours does include people who the Republican Congress and many Nixon/Reagan/Bush appointed partisan judges convicted for political reasons.
Uh-huh. And the holier-than-thou Democrats would never stoop to that level, right?
http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/summary_0199-5149783_ITM
Oh yeah, the only thing you've managed to fuck your entire life is your left hand.
No, I don't selectively edit the Constitution. You're just lying.
Sure you do. You've stated repeatedly in the past you want to do away with the 2nd Amendment and that the Heller Supreme Court was unfortunate. Or am I "lying"...again?
My point is that Republicans are worse.
That may be your point, but you are ...wrong. The Clinton administration was a demonstration of naked criminality in office. Witness tampering? Check. Witness coercion? Check. Illegally accessing the FBI files of political opponents for the purposes of blackmail? Check. Attacking countries to distract away from domestic problems? Check. Taking bribes in exchange for pardons? Check. Taking illegal campaign contributions from foreign donors tied to the Chinese military? Check. Taking illegal campaign contributions from foreign donors tied to the dictator in Indonesia? Check. Perjury under oath? Check.
CRIME STATS
- Number of individuals and businesses associated with the Clinton machine who have been convicted of or pleaded guilty to crimes: 47
- Number of these convictions during Clinton's presidency: 33
- Number of indictments/misdemeanor charges: 61
- Number of congressional witnesses who have pleaded the Fifth Amendment, fled the country to avoid testifying, or (in the case of foreign witnesses) refused to be interviewed: 122
Yeah, those big bad Republicans are soooo much worse.
Doc, you are just a political hack douche bag carrying water for the socialist, elitist Democrats. And one that can't even get his facts straight. Why don't you just come out and admit it? Acceptance is the first step to recovery, although your condition may be congenital.
The right to a means of effective self defense is the most basic, fundamental right there is. The "liberal" (aka leftist) obsession with gun control is nothing other than a naked attempt to subvert this right and leave the populace completely dependent on the government for their protection (and livelyhood, and values). A free society with the means of self defense is anathema to the average leftist, who think people are cattle to be herded and led.
A lot of the rest of us find the idea of the death penalty to be extremely immoral, especially when its application is racially biased. We also see it as immoral to start wars, give guns of any sort to anyone that wants them, ignore the economic plight of our neighbors, and keep consenting adults from being happy in any way they choose as long as it doesn't directly affect our lives (nope, being disgusted by it doesn't count).
It's interesting that liberals would object to the death penalty for murderers, but have no problem murdering unborn children. Quite a few, in fact, support partial birth abortions (aka intact dilation and evacuation) through the 3rd trimester. Obama is one such liberal.
As for starting wars, Iraq is merely a continuation of a previous war, and the war in Afghanistan wasn't started by us.
Giving guns to "any sort that wants them"...I love how liberals selectively edit out explicit parts of the Constitution they don't like by judicial fiat, while creating, from whole cloth, fully incorporated rights from thin air. Luckily, this time, you guys could only find 4 traitorous scumbag Supreme Court Justices to decide a right wasn't really a right.
As to ignoring the economic plight of your neighbors, you're right. You don't ignore it. You try to steal every damn nickel and dime from your neighbors so that you can give it away to prove how generous you are with other people's money.
FWIW, I'm libertarian in most ways
Bullshit. Based on what you wrote prior to this, you're just as perverse as any moralizing far right TV evangelist. You just have a different set of values you want to impose on everyone else around you.
Oh yeah, your advocated version of democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. We already have a society where 50% of the workers in the US effectively have no net Federal tax liability and the "rich" pay the vast majority of all income taxes. It's hard to get more unfair than that. From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs, eh comrade?
Just because Bush is worse than Nixon doesn't mean Nixon wasn't really bad. He was.
And so was Johnson, and so was Clinton, and you can almost assuredly throw Reagan and Bush 41 in there as well.
But hey, aren't you the guy that selectively edits the parts of the Constitution you don't like? So what exactly is your point other than "I don't like Republicans?", because it doesn't appear to be governance according to the Constitution.
Sorry, wealth disparity doesn't explain it. There are more poor whites than poor blacks. Blacks only make up 13% of the US population. Yet they account for, as I said above, over half the violent crime in the US...meaning their offender rate is far above the norm even if you control for income. Now, it's probably due to a whole host of factors including urbanization, partial exclusion from mainstream society, common acceptance of a criminal and violent lifestyle within the community, etc, but there is no simple lever like "ban guns" or "end poverty" for violent crime (especially the non-economic motivated kind like rape).
Hey look, it's the elitist yet socialist Doc Ruby piping in again about what the proles should and shouldn't have.
More important than the right to overthrow our government is the very basic English common law right to self-defense. Firearms are the most useful means of self-defense against the depredations of violent crime. Harsh words, pocket knifes, emergency whistles, Brinks home security, and calling 911 much less so. The State has no obligation to defend you (as upheld by the Supreme Court), self-defense is a personal responsibility. Given that, the State is obligated to give you sufficient means to do so.
The average violent offender in the United States is: a young black male. Blacks commit over 50% of violent crime in the United States. White violent offender rates are much more in line with European norms.
You can't compare societies with different ethnic, religious, age, and cultural makeups and assume that a solution that works great for the Netherlands would work equally well in the United States or elsewhere.
You need to read the decision more carefully.
From page 8:
"Some have made the argument, bordering on the frivolous, that only those arms in existence in the 18th century are protected by the Second Amendment. We do not interpret constitutional rights that way. Just as the First Amendment protects modern forms of communications, e.g., Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, 521 U. S. 844, 849 (1997), and the Fourth Amendment applies to modern forms of search, e.g., Kyllo v. United States, 533 U. S. 27, 35â"36 (2001), the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the
founding."
Pretty effectively demolishes the assertion that only muskets and swords are allowed, which the prohibitionist left likes to bring up periodically.
Furthermore
The majority of laws passed these days target law abiding citizens as a means of control rather than crime prevention. Gun control laws are no different.
Breakdown of the Federal budget in 2007:
17% defense
21% Social Security
14% Medicare
13% Unemployment & Welfare
10% Medicaid.
You can see a nice pretty pie chart that even an idiot like you can read here:
http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/d/dd/Fbs_us_fy2007.png
But I'll sum it up for you. 10+13+14+21 = 58% of the budget going to transfer payments while 17% of the budget goes to defense spending, so no, the majority of the Federal budget isn't going to the big bad evil Military Industrial Complex.
Wait, so you are saying that Dodd didn't slip in this rider?
Oh wait, I guess not. What's your point again other than carrying water for a corrupt Democrat?
They aren't bailing out the banks with your tax money, they are bailing them out with the money left in your wallet in the form of an inflation tax. So you get screwed coming and going.
Are you equating your self with the best and brightest?
If anything, those numbers are hopeless optimistic. Because the Federal government, under Republicans or Democrats, has been unable to restrain itself from promising more and more benefits to more and more people, yet not providing a way of paying for it.
You want to "pay as we go", but we can't pay for what we've already promised. Or rather, we can, but only at a confiscatory (70%+) tax rate. And this is without socialized / single payer national health care, Obama's plan to take another 10 million workers off the tax rolls, expansion of the military (oh yeah, that's in Obama's platform), and various other spending increases Obama's platform would require to implement.
This isn't a piss on Obama post or a McCain is great post. This is a "we've been sold down the river" with empty promises that our children and grand children will be enslaved to pay for so a baby boom generation can retire in some comfort. And there isn't a single damn viable politician on the national stage that's willing to speak up about.
Sure. The Dallas Federal Reserve bank has some good articles on it.
This has a primer with pretty graphs:
http://www.dallasfed.org/research/swe/2005/swe0501b.html
This is a speech given by Richard W. Fisher, the CEO of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank:
http://www.dallasfed.org/news/speeches/fisher/2008/fs080528.cfm
Another good resource is "The Coming Generational Storm" by Kotlikoff and Burns.
Another place to start is the Gokhale-Smetters study commissioned by fired Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill in 2002. The data is out of date since the Prescription Drug Plan wasn't in effect there and has adversely affected the bottom line. They estimated was a $45 trillion shortfall at that point in time.
They also came up with a "Menu of Pain" on how to pay for it. Starting in 2003, you would need to increase Federal income taxes by 69% or increase payroll taxes by 95%, or cut Federal purchases by 106%, or cut Social Security and Medicare by 45% (or some combination of the 4).
If you wait until 2008, your numbers go to 74%, 103%, 115%, and 47% respectively, assuming your net obligations stay the same.
Of course, in the 5 years since, we haven't started, and worse, we've added to our obligations.
The information is out there, put out by reputable government sources and academic sources.
Obama is, by any stretch of the imagination, the most far left candidate that's ever been nominated by a major party. He's not only far to the left of the mainstream of American, he's further left than what the left thinks is the mainstream of America.
He can't run on his legislative accomplishments, because he has none. He was basically in the Senate for 1 year when he started running for President.
He can't run on his voting record or his actual beliefs, because that puts him at odds with the majority of American voters.
What he can run on, however, is the voters beliefs which they then project onto him. In that sense, he's an empty suit. It's brilliantly dishonest. We'll see how long he can pull it off though in a general election.