Following Hillary’s thrashing of Bernie in New York, the media is finally waking up to the fact that she is just about guaranteed to be the Democratic presidential nominee and most likely will become President of the U.S. next January.
What shock for the poor pundits! How did this happen while they were so busy ooohing and ahhing over Bernie’s giant rallies and the “enthusiasm” of all those white millennials for his shouting and finger-wagging? Why didn’t all the crowds, the $27 “grass roots” donations, the yard signs, and on-line bullying turn into votes for “the Bern?”
The cultists say it’s “voter suppression,” but other commentators are taking a page from Richard Nixon–it must be a “silent majority.” Here’s Michelle Goldberg at Slate yesterday:
Until Tuesday night, I had assumed that my neighborhood, Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, was overwhelmingly supporting Bernie Sanders. Sanders bumper stickers and T-shirts outnumbered those for Hillary Clinton by what seemed like 20 to 1. A couple of times, I thought about putting my baby daughter in a Clinton onesie—whatever my hesitations about Clinton’s candidacy, I love the idea of my girl’s first image of an American president being female. But I always hesitated, not wanting to invite playground harangues from local dads about Goldman Sachs and the Fed.
When I looked up Cobble Hill on the nifty New York Times tool providing neighborhood-by-neighborhood results, however, it turned out that Clinton won the immediate area around my apartment by 59.4 percent. A block over, she won by 72.5 percent. She won all around me. A lot of Clinton supporters, evidently, have been keeping quiet about their allegiances.
There are a couple of explanations for this. Sanders fans seem to be more enthusiastic, though it takes a certain amount of enthusiasm to vote in a primary at all. Registered independents couldn’t vote in New York’s closed primary, particularly given the absurd, undemocratic October deadline for switching parties. But I think there might be something else at work as well: an optical illusion that the candidate with the most white male support had the most support, period. I had let myself mistake the loudest people for The People.
I’m not trying to deny that the Sanders coalition is diverse or to erase the many passionate women and men of color who supported him. But the fact remains that according to exit polls, Clinton won every racial and gender demographic except white men. And somehow, I’d become convinced that, in my own backyard, their preferences were far more widespread than they really are.
Brooklyn is full of a certain kind of archetypal Sanders voter—young, hip, highly educated, and ideological. But in Brooklyn as a whole, Hillary Clinton beat native son Bernie Sanders by 20 percent. The borough was with her, even if it didn’t always feel like it.
It’s not that Clinton voters aren’t enthusiastic, it’s just that they aren’t as loud and obnoxious at Bernie supporters. And of course, they voted. How many people at Bernie’s huge rallies were from out of state or not registered as Democrats? Probably plenty.
A few days before Bernie Sanders lost badly in the New York primary, 27,000 souls filled Washington Square Park, many wildly cheering him on. The political media consensus interpreted the scene as evidence of surging support for the senator from Vermont….
The numbers at Washington Square were dwarfed by the battalions of working-class New Yorkers juggling two children and three jobs. These mostly Clinton voters were unable to attend any rally.
This last group is the subject here. It is the silent liberal majority.
Richard Nixon popularized the term “silent majority” in 1969. He was referring to the Middle Americans appalled by the Vietnam-era protests and associated social chaos. They didn’t demonstrate, and the so-called media elite ignored them.
Today’s liberal version of the silent majority is heavy with minorities and older people. Its members tend to be more socially conservative than those on the hard left and believe President Obama is a good leader.
Harrop points out that many reporters fall into the Sanders demographics.
Many political reporters belong to the white gentry that has fueled the Sanders phenomenon. Nothing wrong with that, as long as they know where they’re coming from. But some don’t seem to know about the vast galaxies of Democratic voters beyond the university and hipster ZIP codes.
In so many races — including those of the other party — reporters confine themselves to carefully staged political events and a few interviews with conveniently placed participants. From the atmospherics, they deduce the level of support for a particular candidate.
As our country heads toward the second half of the primary season as well as the general election, the national media is doing its best to gauge the level of excitement for each of the remaining five campaigns. From rallies to political donations to online polling, our friends in the media are attempting to quantify the unquantifiable level of excitement that each campaign is generating. By using this immeasurable measure, the media feels it can then interpret its result to create an overall narrative for how each campaign is doing. Clearly the campaign with most excitement is the one where the people are excited for their candidate and are going to go all out for him and her. This campaign will be the one with all the momentum moving forward while those campaigns with less excitement are likely to fall flat as we approach the conventions.
But let us take a moment to examine this theory, particular with the Democratic primary. Based on all the metrics listed above, it should be clear that Bernie Sanders is the candidate whose campaign is engulfed in enthusiasm. His rabid army of supporters have flocked to his rallies, producing crowds of upwards of 30,000 people, causing many venues to overflow. He raised nearly $44 million last month and now has amassed over 6 million contributions and growing. His loyal followers frequent online polls and exuberantly declare Sanders the winner of each and every Democratic debate or town hall performance….All this combined with victories in five out of the last six states and it would appear that the enthusiasm and momentum are clearly on the side of Bernie Sanders.
Especially when you compare his campaign to that of Hillary Clinton. Clinton’s rallies are never raucous, overflowing events. In fact, her most recent rally was held at the Apollo Theater, a venue that seats a mere 1,500 people. Clinton raised $13 million less than Bernie Sanders last month and she only recently amassed her one-millionth campaign contribution in mid-March. She often loses online polls by 60+ points after debates regardless of how well either her supporters or the media say she fared. Her national lead in the polls has all but vanished and after having won five consecutive primaries on March 15th, she has only won a single one since. Based on all this, there would appear to be a distinct lack of enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton’s campaign at this point in time.
But appearances can be deceiving, especially appearances falsely created by our mainstream media.
Read the rest at the link.
On Tuesday night, Sanders abandoned his campaign press corps in Pennsylvania and flew back to Burlington, Vermont to rest and reassess his situation. MSNBC’s Alex Seitz-Wald asks “Where does Sanders go from here?”
With the Democratic presidential nomination now further out of reach after his drubbing in New York on Tuesday, the Vermont senator faces the difficult question about what comes next. Does he set a do-whatever-it-takes course to wrest the nomination from rival Hillary Clinton? Or does he return to the message campaign, as his long-shot White House bid started out to be?
The Sanders campaign poured itself into New York, throwing a hail mary pass to try to change the delegate math while they could. They spent $5.6 million (twice what Hillary Clinton did), made 3 million phone calls in the final weekend alone, and organized the biggest rallies of a campaign defined by big rallies.
But in the end Sanders came up short – not just of winning, but of the delegate target allies had aimed to hit, which might set them up for a path through California, the campaign’s final hope.
Now, with the nomination even further out of reach, Sanders faces the difficult question about what comes next. Does he set a do-whatever-it-takes course to actually win the Democratic nomination? Or does he return to the message campaign his long-shot White House bid was originally seen as?
Seitz-Wald talked to people at Democracy For America and Move On, which support Bernie; and although they don’t explicitly say so, their representatives apparently were not happy with Sanders’ focus on attacking Clinton and complaining about the election process. Read all about it at the link. It’s an interesting article.
At The New York Times, Lara M. Brown, a political science professor at George Washington University, says that Bernie Sanders should drop out because he has already achieved his purpose of pushing the Democratic Party to the left and helped Clinton become a better candidate because of the competition.
We’ll probably see more of these kinds of reevaluations by journalists over the next couple of days. It should be interesting to see whether the messages coming out of the Sanders campaign will be modified.
It’s already clear that there’s a difference of opinion between campaign manager Jeff Weaver and senior adviser Tad Devine about going to the convention and trying to flip superdelegates. Sanders himself has suddenly announced that he will remain a Democrat for life. What brought that on? It should be an interesting day in politics.
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Today is the New York primary, and I’m really hoping New York will send a strong message to the increasingly whiny and desperate Sanders campaign. Bernie Sanders has truly become “the Ralph Nader ” of 2016.
Last night the Sanders campaign sent a letter (pdf) to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) accusing Hillary Clinton of somehow misusing funds from her joint fund-raising agreement with the DNC (The Hillary Victory Fund) to raise funds for Democrats running for Congress and for 32 state Democratic Party organizations.
“proper channel for complaints about campaign finance is the FEC, not the DNC. I have found no evidence of a complaint being filed with the FEC on these grounds.”
Since the Sanders campaign hasn’t made such a report to the FEC, I have to assume that this is just another Hail Mary pass from Sanders in his effort to damage Hillary Clinton’s reputation and convince low-information voters that she is corrupt.
Here’s the deal. Clinton, like Sanders and other presidential candidates, has set up a joint fundraising committee with her political party. The JFC allows you to raise a huge chunk of change (more now than in past campaigns, thanks to the Supreme Court blowing out the aggregate federal limits in the McCutcheon case). A small bit goes to the candidate’s committee under the federal limits (currently $2,700 for the primary and $2,700 for the general). The next bit goes to the DNC, and the rest so state parties in $10,000 chunks. Sanders is accusing the joint committee of raising really big donations, and then having the JFC using some of those really big donations to engage in direct mail and internet targeting of small donors. When those small donors donate small amounts, contributions up to the first $2,700 benefit Clinton under the JFC agreement, and because these are small donors, it means Clinton gets all that small donor money.
The Deutsch letter cites no authority showing that this use of the JFC is not allowed, and it is hard to see what provision of the law it violates when donors give only small amounts that happen to benefit only Clinton. The letter says that maybe this is like an in-kind contribution from the DNC to the Clinton campaign, but I don’t see how it is that if the money is coming from the JFC not from the committee. The letter even says this means that those giving big checks to the DNC might thereby be giving more than the $2,700 to Clinton, which is not literally true—it is what the JFC is doing with the money, over which the donors have no control.
For the past few days, Sanders and his supporters have even been complaining about New York’s election laws and arguing that having a closed primary in which only registered Democrats can vote for a Democratic candidate is unfair to him!
John Cole, who has been largely supportive of Bernie Sanders throughout the primary campaign, calls Sanders out: The Whiniest Revolution Ever.
I really did spend much of this campaign pretty neutral- if anything, I thought I was tougher on the Clinton team most of it than the Sanders campaign. I liked the Sanders camps enthusiasm and I like his positions on many things (who doesn’t!), but eventually I decided it just wasn’t realistic and that we would be better off with Clinton. Having said that, we are now to the point that I am just fed up TO HERE (raises good arm over head)….
…with all the dipshits whining that as Independents they can’t vote in the closed Democratic primary and how closed primaries are a scourge against democracy, etc., ad nauseum, this [the Sanders campaign letter to the DNC] is the kind of shit that wants me to put the collective campaign in a box, weight it down, and throw it in the East River….
A good democrat knows to make sure they are registered and registered for the right party….A good democrat raises money for downticket races. A good democrat doesn’t spend the entire primary creating faux controversies to weaken the party and party structure. A good democrat doesn’t run around tellking half the states they don’t matter or count. A good democrat doesn’t do what the fucking Sanders campaign has done the last couple of months.
So that’s the latest rat-fucking from the Sanders campaign. Whether it will have any effect on votes in the New York primary, I don’t know. My guess is most New Yorkers will be able to see through Bernie’s smokescreen. We’ll find out tonight.
On the eve of the New York Democratic primary — where he needs a strong showing to have any hope of winning the presidential nomination contest — Bernie Sanders has repeatedly emphasized the importance of a large turnout.
In an April 12 speech in Syracuse, Sanders told supporters, “A week from today there’s going to be an enormously important Democratic primary in New York state. What we have found is we win when voter turnout is high, we lose when it is low. Next Tuesday, let us come out in large numbers. Let us have the highest voter turnout in Democratic primary history in New York.”
The verdict:
Sanders said, “We win when voter turnout is high, we lose when it is low.”
Sanders did notch a few notable victories in high-turnout primaries, but it would be cherry-picking to focus only on primaries. Sanders has mostly won caucuses, which have produced the lowest turnout rates of 2016 across the board. And while Sanders did win the handful of states where Democratic turnout increased over 2008, these increases were tiny, casting doubt on how significant an accomplishment this is.
The statement contains some element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression, so we rate it Mostly False.
Read the whole discussion at the link. Basically, most of Sanders’ wins have been in caucuses, with low turnout–but you knew that already. Mr. Holier-Than-Thou is a bald-faced liar, folks.
BUFFALO, N.Y. — At a campaign rally on the eve of the New York primary, Donald Trump read aloud an emotional testimonial on what he considers “New York values” and mistakenly said 7-Eleven instead of 9/11.
“I wrote this out, and it’s very close to my heart — because I was down there, and I watched our police and our firemen down on 7-Eleven, down at the World Trade Center, right after it came down, and I saw the greatest people I’ve ever seen in action,” Trump said at a rally near the Buffalo waterfront on Monday evening, without stopping to correct himself. “I saw the bravest people I’ve ever seen, including the construction workers, including every person down there. That’s what New York values is about.”
Is it really worth it for Bernie to keep hammering Hillary and possibly put this asshole in the White House?
In a shakeup that’s roiling Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, the GOP front-runner told senior staffers at a Saturday meeting that he wants his recent hires Paul Manafort and Rick Wiley to take the reins in upcoming states, giving them a $20 million budget for key contests in May and June, according to three sources with knowledge of the meeting.
The spending authorization, which covers most of the month of May, is far more than the campaign has spent in any prior month, according to Federal Election Commission filings. The cash infusion — which the sources said is intended to fund an aggressive advertising push, as well as more staff at Trump’s New York headquarters and in upcoming states — is part of an effort by the billionaire to expand and professionalize a shoestring operation that had mostly gotten by on the strength of free media exposure and a small core team.
But sources inside the Trump campaign said the moves are increasingly alienating staff loyal to the original team, headed by campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, which had guided Trump from the political fringe to the precipice of the GOP presidential nomination with relatively little campaign infrastructure or spending.
One key Lewandowski loyalist, national field director Stuart Jolly, on Monday submitted a letter of resignation, according to the sources, who characterized Jolly as displeased with the reorganization. Under the new structure, Jolly would have reported to Wiley, who was hired last week by Manafort as political director. In turn, Wiley, who previously ran Scott Walker’s disappointing presidential campaign, will report to Manafort, who was hired late last month and quickly boasted “I work directly for the boss.”
One operative who has worked with the campaign and was briefed on the changes said “Stuart will not work with Rick Wiley. It just wasn’t going to happen.” The operative added that the change had sparked particular concern among the campaign’s field staff, many of whom were hired by Jolly and maintained close contact with him — a rarity on a campaign with a reputation for top-down communication.
Read much more at the link. David Graham has more details at The Atlantic.
“Hillary, Hillary,” chanted a crowd of women, and some men, in a chandeliered ballroom at the Hilton hotel in Midtown Manhattan as Hillary Clinton’s team of powerhouse women took the stage April 18. The presidential candidate was joined by New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand, former Arizona congresswoman Gabby Giffords, the head of Planned Parenthood Federation of America Cecile Richards, the city’s First Lady Chirlane McCray, among others.
Clinton was joined by a number of her congressional friends long her stalwart supporters. “A vote for Hillary is a vote for yourself, for your city, for your country,” said one of New York’s US representatives Carolyn Maloney. Some of the women onstage were returning a favor to Clinton, who had helped them in their careers. “My strongest and best mentor has been Hillary Rodham Clinton,” said Gillibrand.
Letitia James, New York’s public advocate and the first woman of color to hold a citywide public office in New York, warmed up the crowd with a fiery speech. “I am of the firm belief that when you want anything done you should give it to a woman,” she said.
The crowd listened attentively as it was Giffords’ turn to speak. “In the White House she will stand up to the gun lobby, that’s why I’m voting for Hillary,” she said. Giffords had been shot in the head during an assassination attempt in 2011. “Speaking is hard for me but [in January] I want to say these two words ‘Madam President,’ ” she said, interrupted seconds later by a crying baby.
Of course the author felt obligated to note that there weren’t many millennials in the audience (someone was young enough to have a baby anyway). Here’s what I have to say about the endless “millennial” meme. So fucking what?!
What stories are you following today? Let us know in the comments, and check back later tonight for a live blog on the NY primary results!
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We just have a few more days until the New York primary is over with. I hope we all survive. Honestly, I don’t know how much more of the Bernie Sanders hype I can take.
Apparently, Bernie got to meet with the Pope in Rome after all, although there are no photos. The Associated Press reports:
U.S. presidential candidate Bernie Sanders told The Associated Press that he met briefly with Pope Francis at the papal residence Saturday and said it was a “real honor” to call on “one of the extraordinary figures” in the world.
Sanders, in Rome for a Vatican conference on economic inequality and climate change, said the meeting took place before the pope left for Greece, where Francis was highlighting the plight of refugees.
The Vermont senator, in a race with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for president, said he told the pope that he appreciated the message that Francis was sending the world about the need to inject morality and justice into the world economy. Sanders said that was a message he, too, has tried to convey.
Jeffrey Sachs must have some serious pull at the Vatican.
Sanders and his wife, Jane, stayed overnight at the pope’s residence, the Domus Santa Marta hotel in the Vatican gardens, on the same floor as the pope….Jeffrey Sachs, a Sanders foreign policy adviser, said there were no photographs taken of the meeting.
Domus Santa Marta
The Pope lives in a hotel? I did not know that.
Sanders said the meeting should not be viewed as the pope injecting himself into the campaign.
“The issues that I talked about yesterday at the conference, as you well know, are issues that I have been talking about not just throughout this campaign but throughout my political life,” Sanders said in the interview. “And I am just very much appreciated the fact that the pope in many ways has been raising these issues in a global way in the sense that I have been trying to raise them in the United States.”
Well, Sanders doesn’t get to decide how this is “viewed.” In my opinion, it will certainly be interpreted as the Pope “injecting himself” into a U.S. election campaign.
Sachs said the candidate and his wife met the pope in the foyer of the domus, and that the meeting lasted about five minutes. Sanders later joined his family, including some of his grandchildren, for a walking tour of St. Peter’s Basilica, one of the holiest Catholic shrines.
In that instance, Francis “greeted” a number of people in passing as he left the Vatican Embassy in Washington DC. The Pope did not know that Davis was there.
The AP article says that Sanders “met” the pope in “the foyer of the domus” of the hotel. If Francis did actually meet and talk personally to Sanders, I think he made a big mistake. We’ll just have to wait and see what the fallout will be.
Bernie and Jane Sanders disembark from chartered Delta 767 in Rome.
A day after Bernie Sanders claimed he ‘introduced the most comprehensive climate change legislation’ and said he would tax carbon use, the Democratic presidential candidate chartered a Delta 767 to fly him to Rome and back for less than 24 hours.
After attacking rival Hillary Clinton for her stance on fossil fuels stepped on Thursday, Sanders stepped off the plane on Friday in Rome for the Vatican conference with his wife, ten family members, a group of campaign staff, Secret Service detail and members of the press.
The total group of what is believed to be below 50, flew in a chartered Delta 767 for their trip, which can seat between 211 and 261 people, depending on the model. It is unclear if Sanders’ aircraft had flatbed seats.
A 767 aircraft carries up to 23,980 gallons of fuel, which is ‘enough to fill 1,200 minivans’, according to Boeing.
Sanders’ wife, who is Catholic and ten of Sanders’ other family members joined him for the 8,870 round-trip flight, including four of his grandchildren….
With a range of 6,408 miles on a full tank of gas, it can be calculated that a 767 like Sanders’ flying 4,435 miles from New York to Rome uses approximately 16,596 gallons of fuel. The round-trip flight will use approximately 33,193 gallons.
On average, an American flies only 7,500 miles per year, according to AmericanForests.org, 1,360 fewer miles than Sanders’ round-trip Rome travel. Thus, an average American releases less carbon emissions via aircraft each year than Sanders did in 24 hours.
Hillary Clinton tours public housing building in Harlem yesterday.
Clinton traveled to East 116th Street in Harlem for a tour of the Corsi Houses, a seniors-only New York City Housing Authority building that has struggled with mold, leaks and an inadequate repair system.
“I wanted to come here to really make a very strong plea that we do more when I am president to help the people who live in developments like this,” Clinton said.
She was given access to an apartment on the second floor that was in the midst of a major repair job to fix mold issues and leaks….
“I will do everything I can as your president to remember what needs to be done here in the city that I love, that is the greatest city in the world,” she said to cheers from the crowd.
To fix NYCHA, which has suffered for years from federal disinvestment, she said she would boost funding for the section 8 program, invest $125 billion to help struggling communities like the South Bronx, and expand Low Income Housing Tax Credits to curb rental costs.
“I will fight for you,” she said.
Clinton also hobnobbed with residents and guests, at one point joining in a game of dominoes in the rec room.
Outspoken actress Sharon Stone recently told The Hollywood Reporter she worries the presidential candidate, 74, dabbled in psychedelic drugs during his younger years.
“He didn’t really work until he was 40, so I wonder, like, how much acid has this guy taken?” the “Basic Instinct” star told the magazine.
“I really do (wonder), that’s not a joke. We were so aggressive asking people, ‘Did you smoke pot?’ But in reality, how much acid has Bernie Sanders taken?” she asked again.
“There’s a certain edge to his personality and way about his behavior that makes me wonder, ‘How much LSD have you taken?'” she asked a third time during the recent interview.
Weird. IMHO, if Bernie had taken some acid trips he might not be so grumpy and negative today.
Bernie and Jane have finally released their full tax returns (except for the list of charities) from 2014. They say they will also release the 2015 return once it is filed. No word on the rest of the promised returns going back to 2007. David Cay Johnston at The National Memo:
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders released nearly all of his and wife Jane Sanders’ 2014 tax return Friday night, but that disclosure still remains far from his wife’s promise to release returns for the last eight years — raising more questions about the candidate’s judgment and his wife’s claims.
As expected there was nothing startling in the schedules, but the failure to fulfill their promise to release returns back to 2007 — when Sanders was first elected to the U.S. Senator from Vermont — erodes the likelihood that other Presidential candidates this cycle and in the future will release their own full returns.
A key detail withheld by Sanders until Friday night prompts yet another question: The senator and his wife have both said on national television that Jane Sanders prepares the couple’s returns using TurboTax software. But a schedule that had been withheld until now shows $204 in tax preparation fees.
The most expensive version of TurboTax sold currently — a higher grade product than needed to prepare the couple’s returns, costs $109.99 That price includes both an online download and a compact disc. And that is the price charged by Intuit, the manufacturer, with retailers offering discounts pricing the top product at under $100.
Hmmm . . . maybe Jane got a fee for filling out the forms?
Bernie bros protest high dollar fund-raiser for down-ticket Democrats in San Francisco
While Bernie was out of the country, his supporters picketed a fund-raiser hosted by Amal and George Clooney for Democratic candidates in San Francisco, where they chanted, “Hey hey, ho ho, Hillary Clinton has got to go.” Very classy. ABC News describes the bizarre scene:
Approximately 100 Bernie Sanders supporters demonstrated outside of a George and Amal Clooney-hosted Hillary Clintonfundraiser Friday night in San Francisco’s upscale Nob Hill neighborhood.
Clinton and her aides arrived at the home of venture capitalist and Democratic donor Shervin Pishevar around 6:30 p.m. for the fundraiser, which kicked off at 7 p.m. Tickets to the event cost roughly $30,000 per person or $350,000 per table. (This is the first of two Clooney-hosted fundraisers this weekend. On Saturday night, the Clooneys are hosting another fundraiser, at his home in Los Angeles.)
The San Francisco street where the home is located was blocked off by police, but the protesters gathered at the top of the hill and then marched around the block.
Holding signs that read “Hillary: You can’t sit with us unless you have money” and “$353,000 for Dinner? And you thought SF home prices are high,” while banging pots and pans, protesters were vocal about Clinton’s ties to big money.
“Hey, hey, ho ho, Hillary Clinton has got to go!” the crowd, many of whom appeared to be in their twenties and thirties yelled out. “Bernie or Bust!”
It’s difficult to fathom why these people oppose raising money for Democrats running for Congress. Wouldn’t a President Bernie Sanders need Democrats in the House and Senate? The ways of Bernie supporters are very mysterious.
That’s all I have for you today. I didn’t even look at the Republican side of the campaign. It’s all just too crazy for me today. And now I plan to try to regain some kind of serenity before the big showdown arrives on Tuesday.
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Bernie and Jane: Fighting all those “Corporate Democratic Whores”
Good Morning!!
So . . . tonight’s debate should be interesting. In the past few weeks, Bernie Sanders has been attacking Hillary Clinton in the most insulting, sexist, and damaging ways most decent people could possibly imagine.
He has implied again and again that she is corrupt, while providing no evidence. He has denigrated her as “the establishment” candidate and attacked anyone who endorses her as “the establishment”–even groups that provide support and services to women, like Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and Emily’s List. Last week, Sanders even baldly stated that Clinton is “unqualified” to be president.
Here’s the latest from a Sanders rally in NYC last night.
Dr. Paul Song: Now Secretary Clinton has said that Medicare for all will never happen. [boos] Well, I agree with Secretary Clinton that Medicare for all will never happen if we have a president who never aspires for something greater than the status quo. [cheers] Medicare for all will never happen if we continue to elect corporate Democratic whores[cheers] who are beholden to big pharma and the private insurance industry instead of us.”
The next speaker, Rosario Dawson, said that Clinton is responsible for the hundreds of thousands of deaths in the Middle East and elsewhere. Finally, Sanders arrived at the podium and thanked the previous speakers for their “great introductions.”
Twitter exploded. Dr. Song eventually provided a non-apology.
Not good enough. Too little, too late. Sen. Sanders and Dr. Song should apologize to Hillary Clinton and to Democrats generally. And let’s not forget that President Obama is among the “Democratic whores” too, since he failed to get single payer health care.
This kind of behavior from a presidential campaign is simply unacceptable. Sanders is no better than Trump, IMO.
NEW YORK, NY – APRIL 13: Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders speaks during the Bernie Sanders rally at Washington Square Park on April 13, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Mireya Acierto/FilmMagic)
According to CNN, Sanders said the following about Hillary Clinton the day after he first said she was “unqualified” and after it was explained to him that Hillary had never called him “unqualified.”
“When you voted for the war in Iraq, the most disastrous foreign policy blunder in the history of America, you might want to question your qualifications. When you voted for trade agreements that cost millions of Americans decent paying jobs, and the American people might want to wonder about your qualifications. When you’re spending an enormous amount of time raising money for your super PAC from some of the wealthiest people in this country, and from some of the most outrageous special interests … Are you qualified to be president of the United States when you’re raising millions of dollars from Wall Street whose greed and recklessness helped destroy our economy?”
This has been the theme of Sanders’ attacks on Clinton from the beginning. He has implied again and again that she is corrupt and that any campaign contributions she receives or speeches she makes involve some kind of quid pro quo. He never provides any evidence for these accusations.
Can any intelligent observer really doubt that terms like “corporate Democratic whores” come from the Sanders campaign itself? If they will say the kinds of things they have been saying in public, what must they be saying behind closed doors when the media isn’t listening? Sometimes those sneering private epithets slip out when the rest of us can hear them. That is likely what happened last night. And it was ugly.
For months, Sanders has allowed his supporters to boo and hiss Hillary’s name at his rallies and he has done nothing to stop them from trolling people on social media and even harassing superdelegates in their homes. Where will it end? Will Sanders be proud of himself when excerpts from his speeches and his surrogates’ speeches turn up in Republican campaign ads in the Fall?
Dr. Paul Y. Song
#DemocraticWhores is currently trending on Twitter, and my guess is this will continue to be a story in the build-up to tonight’s debate. After the debate, Jane and Bernie Sanders will travel to Rome where Bernie will give a 10-minute presentation at an academic conference.
Interestingly, Dr. Paul Song is married to journalist Lisa Ling, who supports Clinton. Ling’s sister Laura Ling was released from captivity in North Korea with help from former President Bill Clinton.
Jane Sanders, wife of Sen. Bernie Sanders, didn’t apologize when asked about comments a surrogate made from the stage of the presidential hopeful’s New York City rally last night.
Healthcare activist Paul Song labeled those who chose to keep the current private healthcare system intact, like Hillary Clinton, instead of advocating for a Medicare-for-all plan, like Sanders, ‘Democratic whores.’
When Jane Sanders was asked about it by CNN’s Chris Cuomo she seemed miffed.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t hear it at all,’ Sanders said. ‘It’s a strange choice of words and I can’t imagine anybody was speaking about Secretary Clinton that way.’
Really? It’s difficult to believe that Jane is not aware of the behavior of her husband’s supporters on social media. She certainly has to have heard the catcalls when Clinton is mentioned at her husband’s rallies. How could she not?
Asked about whether the campaign should own the comments and react, Sanders said yes, but also went on the attack.
‘Well, I think all campaigns really need to take some responsibility for what surrogates said,’ Jane Sanders replied. ‘A mischoice of words is not as important as trying to carry out a strategy of trying to disqualify people or try to make them feel less-than.’
Here Jane Sanders seemed to be bringing back up a tiff between the two Democratic camps that began when Clinton refused to say whether Sanders was qualified to be president during an interview on Morning Joe….
Jane Sanders indicated she would not soon forgive those digs from Clinton in her comments this morning.
‘I think there’s a lot of that to go around,’ she said.
It might be time to stop using Jane as a surrogate. She had a very bad day yesterday too. Yesterday the New York Daily News endorsed Hillary Clinton. Jane whined to CNN yesterday that the Daily News interview that Bernie flubbed so badly was “odd” and “more of an inquisition.” The newspaper then wrote up her remarks in a prominent article.
Jane Sanders told CNN that she and her husband discussed his performance after the April 1 meeting. She attributed the Vermont senator’s curt responses, which were considered vague by a number of critics, to the meeting’s quick pace and said a reading of the transcript alone wouldn’t lend itself to a fair assessment.
“I was in that interview, listening, and it was a conversation,” Jane Sanders told CNN’s Brooke Baldwin. “When you see only words down, it doesn’t quite give the flavor of it.
How embarrassing. Maybe her time would be better spent going back to Vermont to find Bernie’s tax returns so he can release them–as Hillary did with hers long ago. But first the Sanders’ will have their Roman Holiday, which reportedly will not include any meeting with the Pope, according to Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi (NYT).
Jane Sanders, wife to Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), expressed concern Thursday about New York’s closed Democratic primary, noting that her husband would change the system if he won the presidency.
Sanders said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that she wouldn’t go as far as calling the Democratic nominating process a rigged system, but argued that there should be same-day registration as well as open primaries and caucuses.
“We have a lot of those—probably a lot of those people out there in the crowd—hopefully a small number, comparatively, are not even able to vote in this election because they didn’t change their registration to Democrat last October when they hadn’t even heard of Bernie Sanders,” Jane Sanders said. “Those kinds of things seem silly. We’re bringing more a lot more people into the party and the party is shutting the door on them. That seems counterproductive to the long-term goals.”
If these Bernie supporters live in New York and wanted to vote, they could have checked the rules and made sure to be registered in time. The Sanders campaign could even have provided the information to supporters. What a concept!
I think every primary and caucus should be closed. Why should non-Democrats choose the party’s nominee?
Jane also said that Hillary Clinton will not have enough delegates to win the nomination outright.
“Going into the convention I think she’ll be just short and we’ll hopefully be just short and I think then we’ll have a discussion about what the best way to go,” Sanders said.
We’ll see. I’m not sure how many superdelegates (AKA “Democratic whores”) are going to support Bernie’s efforts to overthrow the popular vote.
Again, tonight’s debate should be very interesting. It will be on CNN from 9-11, and we’ll have a live blog for discussion, as usual.
I guess you can tell I’m really angry about this. I’ll leave it to you to let me know what else is happening in the world. What stories have you been following?
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Make Way for Ducklings statues, Boston Public Garden
Good Morning!!
For absolutely no sensible reason, I’m illustrating this post with photos of Boston in Spring. It’s not like this yet, but it will be soon. My post won’t be particularly organized, just a mixed bag of stories I wanted to share. My brain just isn’t working as well as I’d like and my thoughts are not organized at all. I’m feeling a lot better than I was a week ago, but I’m still tired and spacey. I have two more days on the antibiotics, and I’m really hoping it will be uphill from here on.
It’s been a long time since Richard Nixon was president, but his effects on our country and its politics still linger. Quite a few books have been published about him recently, and The New York Review of Books has an interesting long review of several of them by historian Robert G. Kaiser: The Disaster of Richard Nixon. I just want to highlight one section of the article that describes how Nixon used the Vietnam War to win the 1968 election.
Vietnam was the defining issue of Nixon’s presidency, as he knew it would be. Months before he became president, Nixon assured H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, his closest aide, that “I’m not going to end up like LBJ, Bob, holed up in the White House, afraid to show my face on the street. I’m going to stop that war. Fast.” Antiwar protesters had driven Lyndon Johnson into early retirement, which allowed Nixon to become president. Nixon played to the country’s war weariness in his 1968 campaign, implying that he had a plan to end the war.
But he had no plan. Ironically, even before he took office Nixon personally sabotaged an opportunity he might have had to avoid Johnson’s fate. The books under review suggest that this is one of the stories that will continue to stain Nixon’s reputation.
Boston Common in Spring
In late October 1968, when Johnson’s negotiators in Paris finally reached an agreement with North Vietnam to end American bombing and begin negotiations on a political settlement, Nixon took an enormous personal risk to derail the peace talks before they could begin. At the time, polls showed that Hubert H. Humphrey, Nixon’s Democratic opponent and Johnson’s vice-president, was rising fast—so fast that Nixon feared he might lose the presidency because of the peace deal. So he performed a dirty trick that foreshadowed many more to come.
For months Nixon had worried about a last-minute deal, or appearance of a deal, that would boost Humphrey. In July he opened his own channel to Nguyen Van Thieu, the president of South Vietnam. As his intermediaries to Thieu Nixon chose his campaign manager, the New York attorney John Mitchell, and Anna Chennault, the exotic, Chinese-born widow of Claire Chennault, a former US Air Force general who led the Chinese Nationalist air force during World War II. In a secret meeting (Nixon loved secret meetings) in Mitchell’s New York office with Chennault and Bui Diem, Thieu’s ambassador to the United States, Nixon explained that when he had a message for Thieu, he would give it to Chennault, who would convey it to the ambassador to forward to Saigon.
Speaking at a conference at Boston University on Saturday, the legendary journalist-turned-author struggled to answer a question about female writers who inspired him.
He mentioned Nora Ephron and Mary McCarthy, followed by an awkward silence. Finally the 84-year-old writer blurted out: “None.”
Talese went on to explain that women writers of his generation did not like to talk to strangers and that prevented them from taking on tough subjects.
The response seemed to stun many in the audience at BU’s Power of Narrative Writing conference. One person shouted out “Joan Didion” as a potential female author to admire, while others took to Twitter to criticize Talese….
Talese’s controversial remarks were soon trending on Twitter, as journalists quickly turned to the social media site.
Spring flowers in Boston Public Garden
After his keynote speech at the conference, Talese went on to insult New York Time Magazine reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones. Richard Prince at journal-isms:
“Hannah-Jones delivered Friday’s keynote address, launching the conference. But when she was introduced to him as a New York Times Magazinestaff writer, Talese was more curious about how she got her job.
“ ‘He asked again if I was actually a staff writer. And I said yes,’ Hannah-Jones told me by phone on Monday. He asked her how she got hired for that job. ‘I said they called and offered me a job,’ she recalled. ‘He asked me who hired me, why was I hired?’
“Hannah-Jones said she was the only Black person in the room.
“ ‘I felt defensive,’ Hannah-Jones recalled. ‘I feel like I’ve been explaining why I’m in a room where apparently people think I’m not supposed to be most of my life, so I know when someone is asking me that question.’
“The conversation moved on to other topics. But at the end of the luncheon, Talese asked Hannah-Jones something else.
“ ‘I was talking with another woman journalist,’ Hannah-Jones recalled. ‘We were trying to figure out what session we were going to go to next, and that’s when he asked me if I was going to get my nails done.’
One day, trying to cover Bobby Kennedy, she found herself in a taxicab between Saul Bellow and Gay Talese. Talese leaned over and said to Bellow, “You know how every year, there’s a pretty girl who comes to New York and pretends to be a writer? Well, Gloria is this year’s pretty girl.” Steinem didn’t object at the time; she was too embarrassed and reluctant to express anger. Decades later, in the telling of the anecdote, she metes out a justified revenge.
My disillusionment with the master of narrative nonfiction happened back in 1999. Talese was a visiting fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and I gladly accepted an offer to work with one of my literary heroes. Before the course began, I reread my favorites of his books: “Fame and Obscurity,” with its remarkable profile of Frank Sinatra, and “Unto the Sons,” the story of his Italian immigrant family.
Our fallout occurred just a few classes into the semester. During a 10-minute break, Talese asked me to make him a cup of tea. The request seemed vaguely demeaning and inappropriate. But I wasn’t really in a position to consider it. My hands were already full with a stack of handouts he’d asked me to photocopy for him. “I’m on my way to copy these,” I nodded toward the stack. “There’s a kitchen just through there, with a kettle on the stove and an assortment of teas in the cabinet.” Our class met at Penn’s Writers House, a lovely 13-room Victorian on the main campus walk that’s a make-yourself-at-home sort of space. Other students from the class had already congregated in the kitchen — I could hear laughter as someone finished telling a story. I assured Talese that they would help if he had trouble finding anything, and then I headed upstairs to the photocopier.
After class that day, we ended up revisiting the tea episode, and Talese berated me for refusing his request. One comment still sears. “You’re not perky enough for me,” he said….
With all the perkiness I could muster, I told Mr. Talese he could find someone else to make him tea and to help teach his class.
I probably spent too much time on that story, but I found it really satisfying to see Talese brought down a peg.
Cherry blossoms at Arnold Arboretum
And now a tale of another woman hater. A judge has been forced to release court documents on Robert Dear’s interviews with police after he murdered three people and injured others at the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic. From The Washington Post: The twisted ‘dream’ of accused Planned Parenthood killer Robert Dear Jr.
Robert Dear Jr. had a hero, Paul Hill, the murderous leader of an anti-abortion group. He also had his enemies: President Obama, for one, who Dear refers to as the “antichrist,” and Planned Parenthood, for another.
And he had a dream: “When he died and went to heaven, he would be met by all the aborted fetuses at the gates of heaven and they would thank him … for what he did because his actions saved lives of other unborn fetuses.” ….
Until Nov. 27, 2015, all Robert Dear had accomplished toward his dream, he told police, was to show up at an abortion clinic in South Carolina and place superglue in all the door locks at the clinic, “so they could not get into the building.” That way, at least, he would have “at least stopped any abortions from occurring” on that particular day and at that particular clinic.
But in late November of last year, Dear put on a makeshift metal vest, made of coins and duct tape, according to the documents, armed himself with four SKS rifles and two propane tanks, and shot up the Planned Parenthood Clinic in Colorado Springs, killing three people, including Ke’Arre Stewart, 29, an Iraq War veteran who had been outside the clinic on his cellphone; Jennifer Tarkovsky, 35, a mother of two who had been at the clinic to support a friend; and Garret Swasey, a University of Colorado police officer who had responded to the incident.
Here’s a bit more about Dear’s idol:
Dear…was determined to emulate Hill, a Presbyterian minister and vocal antiabortion protester who opened fire outside an abortion clinic in 1994. He shot and killed John Bayard Britton, a 69-year-old physician who worked at the clinic, and the doctor’s escort, retired Air Force lieutenant colonel James Herman Barrett.
According to the documents, Dear said Hill “was somebody he thought very highly of.” He previously posted messages to Hill’s website and other online forums espousing his antiabortion and anti-government views….
Hill was executed in 2003, but a page in his name can be found on the domain of the “Army of God,” a Christian antiabortion organization.
A quote from Hill atop the page affirms from whom Dear derived his dogma: “In an effort to suppress this truth, you may mix my blood with the blood of the unborn.”
I understand that the video started recording after your conversation with Gov. Scott was already under way. What had been said before the video?
It started out very calm. I saw his profile and wasn’t sure if it was him. So I just said, “Governor Scott,” and he turned towards me. I asked, “Why did you pass that awful law last week that impacts women’s healthcare choices?” And he said, “I don’t vote on bills,” which is so incredibly disingenuous. If I didn’t understand the political process, at that point I would have thought, “Oh, I got the information wrong,” and I would have dropped it. But he didn’t even own up to the fact that he passed this bill.
So I said, right you don’t vote—but you have executive authority to sign bills into law. And this bill you signed into law is very harmful to women like me, who rely on women’s health services like Planned Parenthood. And he said, go to your county health clinic then.
So I have the governor of the state of Florida telling me which healthcare provider I should go to, in a coffee shop. I bought a smart coffee cup which is very cool at https://www.fastcodesign.com/90150019/the-perfect-smart-coffee-cup-is-here. Completely inappropriate. And basically where the video picks up is when I respond by saying, “You’re an asshole.”
Read the rest at the link.
So those are my offerings for today. What stories are you following?
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