It took me awhile today to get going so I’m a little later on this than usual. Miles snuck outside for a big adventure late last night and I got rather clawed up trying to bring him back in. He’s a total love bug and not usually like that but he drew blood and it was not fun. Today, he’s back to his genial self but sometimes when his blood sugar gets a little out of whack from the diabetes he can get mighty testy about things. My animals are not outdoor animals so I freak when any of them gets loose. My left hand is pretty shredded up and bruised so using a keyboard is not very comfortable for me and sleeping was difficult last night. So, any way blame this late, short post on feisty old Miles. He’s got me sleepy and cranky today.
I really enjoyed Paul Krugman’s blog today on the Pastrami Principle. I could tell from the comments that a lot of Bernie supporters were bristling at the comparison between Bernie’s continual discounting of Southern Democratic Primary voters to that kind of description that comes from also-ran right wing populist Sarah Palin and her choice for President for 2016, Donald Trump.
As Krugman points out, Sanders is trying to make an argument for Super Delegates to discount the popular vote which shows Clinton way ahead. He is doing this on the back of Southern Democrats. This is the second time he’s done this which is why it’s the second time I’m blogging about it.
But how can the campaign make the case that the party should defy the apparent will of its voters? By insisting that many of those voters shouldn’t count. Over the past week, Mr. Sanders has declared that Mrs. Clinton leads only because she has won in the “Deep South,” which is a “pretty conservative part of the country.” The tally so far, he says, “distorts reality” because it contains so many Southern states.
As it happens, this isn’t true — the calendar, which front-loaded some states very favorable to Mr. Sanders, hasn’t been a big factor in the race. Also, swing-state Florida isn’t the Deep South. But never mind. The big problem with this argument should be obvious. Mrs. Clinton didn’t win big in the South on the strength of conservative voters; she won by getting an overwhelming majority of black voters. This puts a different spin on things, doesn’t it?
Is it possible that Mr. Sanders doesn’t know this, that he imagines that Mrs. Clinton is riding a wave of support from old-fashioned Confederate-flag-waving Dixiecrats, as opposed to, let’s be blunt, the descendants of slaves? Maybe. He is not, as you may have noticed, a details guy.
It’s more likely, however, that he’s being deliberately misleading — and that his effort to delegitimize a big part of the Democratic electorate is a cynical ploy.
You should read the entire Op Ed and notice the comments of folks that think Krugman is out of line by comparing the tactics of the left wing populist to his right wing equivalents. The denial runs deep in the Bernie crowd, but as I’ve blogged before, this has incredible racist overtones since he doesn’t discount the white outbacks that he’s won–like Wyoming, Nebraska, Oklahoma, etc–as not being representative. He prefers to characterize Southern Democrats only. It drives me nuts.
Those of us that watched the Brooklyn Democratic Debate last night saw the campaign conversation get nasty. I was glad to see Hillary hitting back and I have to say that despite pundits calling the debate a tie, I found her to be absolutely presidential. She was tough and called him out on his constant hypocritical charges and his lies. This is Rebecca Traister writing for NYMAG.
Oh my god, make it stop.
But it isn’t stopping, because Thursday brought Democrats, including me, our fondest wish and dream: another debate!
And from the start it was clear that this whole civil, respectful race had just deteriorated into some kind of nerdy Punch & Judy show, in which everyone screamed at each other, and over each other (and over the moderators) about 501c4s and Dodd Frank.
No, it was not all bad. Even though the crowd was bellowing with the vigor of their Republican brethren, Sanders and Clinton remained high-minded about the content of their debate, and managed to have some meaningful, if nasty, exchanges. On foreign policy, usually a weak spot, Sanders found a revelatory new groove, offering groundbreaking words about the value of Palestinian lives, and our moral responsibility to question Israeli leadership. His remarkable, electorally risky rhetoric was undercut somewhat by the fact that hours before the debate, Sanders had suspended Simone Zimmerman, the Jewish Outreach coordinator whose hiring had been announced just two days earlier, after reports that she had used vulgar language in reference to Benjamin Netanyahu. It was a move, in response to pressure from conservative pro-Israeli groups, that did not allay fears that as president, Sanders’s stated resolve to implement idealistic policy measures might wither quickly in the face of Republican opposition. Still, Bernie was really great on Palestine.
Meanwhile, in a discussion about guns, Clinton pussy-footed around her silly “per capita” line about guns pouring out of Vermont into New York (yep, @ItTakesAVillage92, I know it is technically correct; it is also lame), but did effectively lay into Sanders on his actually crappy stance on guns. Pointing to the fact that her opponent often laments the greed and recklessness of Wall Street, Clinton asked compellingly, “What about the greed and recklessness of gun manufacturers in America?”
Clinton also managed, almost two hours into this interminable thing, to bring up the concentrated attack on reproductive rights across America, a topic that has not been raised in any of the season’s debates so far, earning her a lot of enthusiastic applause and energetic engagement from Sanders on the topic before Dana Bash cut them off to talk some more about meaningless general-election polling.
But all this interesting stuff was hidden in two hours of yelling. Of “YUUGE” jokes and overcooked lines about “before there was Obamacare there was Hillarycare” and excuses about how Jane does the taxes, which makes them very inaccessible when really, guys, it’s been weeks; you can get someone to dig up copies of the tax returns. All that was good was buried beneath a sheen of rancor, culminating perhaps with Sanders circling around his campaign’s current strategic argument that Hillary’s lead in pledged delegates (and votes, and number of states won) is illegitimate because her victories were so decisive in southern states. “Secretary Clinton cleaned our clock in the Deep South,” said Bernie. “We got murdered there. That is the most conservative part of this great country … But you know what, we’re out of the Deep South now. And we’re moving up.” Putting aside the fact that Clinton’s wins have also come in Massachusetts, Florida, and the Midwest, Bernie’s seeming scorn for voters in southern states, who broke for Clinton perhaps not out of conservatism, but because she has so far done a far better job of reaching black voters, was a low point.
Yes, he went there again about us Southern Democrats right there in Brooklyn on CNN in front of every one watching. I belong to a discussion group on Facebook called American Minorities for Hillary. It’s a very diverse group of minorities to include just about every category possible. I posted the same link to that board as I did down in the comments yesterday which is the second set of analysis from Maddow Blog and Steve Benen on Bernie’s comments. I can unequivocally state that all the Southern Democrats on the board of all shapes and sizes along with a lot of others recognized the tweet of a racist dog whistle.
Bernie Sanders told “Nightly Show” host Larry Wilmore at a taping Wednesday evening that scheduling Southern states early in the Democratic primary “distorts reality.” […]
“Well, you know,” Sanders said, “people say, ‘Why does Iowa go first, why does New Hampshire go first,’ but I think that having so many Southern states go first kind of distorts reality as well.”
Iowa and New Hampshire go first. Then, Nevada. Tell me how those states represent the diversity that is this country. South Carolina goes 4th. Again, are voters in Kansas, Idaho and Utah and more representative? This is why I’m glad the extremely diverse state of New York goes next. You notice he never mentions that he lost Massachusetts which is probably one of the top five most liberal states in the country and he doesn’t mention he lost Ohio which is a bit of a US microcosm. I’m getting tired of being his whipping boy. He’s not attracting Black voters. He needs to own that and figure out why.
Today’s column offers an opportunity to say, for the record, why I haven’t been the Bernie booster a lot of people apparently expected me to be. For the business about discounting Clinton support as coming from “conservative states” in the “Deep South” actually exemplifies the problem I saw in the Sanders campaign from the beginning, and made me distrust both the movement and the man.
What you see, on this as on multiple issues, is the casual adoption, with no visible effort to check the premises, of a story line that sounds good. It’s all about the big banks; single-payer is there for the taking if only we want it; government spending will yield huge payoffs — not the more modest payoffs conventional Keynesian analysis suggests; Republican support will vanish if we take on corporate media.
In each case the story runs into big trouble if you do a bit of homework; if not completely wrong, it needs a lot of qualification. But the all-purpose response to anyone who raises questions is that she or he is a member of the establishment, personally corrupt, etc.. Ad hominem attacks aren’t a final line of defense, they’re argument #1.
I know some people think that I’m obsessing over trivial policy details, but they’re missing the point. It’s about an attitude, the sense that righteousness excuses you from the need for hard thinking and that any questioning of the righteous is treason to the cause. When you see Sanders supporters going over the top about “corporate whores” and such, you’re not seeing a mysterious intrusion of bad behavior into an idealistic movement; you’re seeing the intolerance that was always just under the surface of the movement, right from the start.
I feel Krugman’s pain. It’s really hard to watch Bernie and his folks go completely off the deep end on what is and isn’t possible on all levels and to ignore the concerns of women, minorities, and the GLBT community by suggesting all of our problems would be solved by closing all the big banks, giving us medicare for all, free college and a $15 minimum wage. Bernie never has solid answers for any of his policies. In that way, he is very much like Palin and Trump. After the ideological rants, there is very little “there there”.
I’ve actually found two somewhat unenthusiastic voters for Bernie that actually sound reasonable about their votes. Their eyes are wide open and they’d reconsider their votes for him in Maryland if it actually looked as though he was going to win. This is an interesting read at TPM.
“He’s not going to get the nomination, is he?” my wife asks anxiously as she gazes out of the kitchen window at the Bernie for President sign on our front lawn. No, I assure her, and he certainly won’t win Maryland on April 26. I’m voting for Bernie, and my wife may, too, but we’re doing so on the condition that we don’t think he will get the nomination. If he were poised to win, I don’t know whether I’d vote for him, because I fear he would be enormously vulnerable in a general election, even against Donald Trump or Ted Cruz, and I’m also not sure whether he is really ready for the job of president.
Why, then, vote for him at all? For me, it’s entirely about the issues he is raising, which I believe are important for the country’s future. Hillary Clinton and her various boosters in the media have made the argument that it’s impractical and even irresponsible to raise a demand like “Medicare for all” and “free public college” that could not possibly get through the next Congress, even if Democrats eke out a majority in the Senate. They presumably want a candidate to offer programs that could be the result of protracted negotiations between a Democratic president and Speaker Paul Ryan – like a two percent increase in infrastructure spending in exchange for a two percent reduction in Medicaid block grants. I disagree with this approach to politics.
I guess a symbolic vote for a symbolic agenda has as much merit as anything I’ve heard from the BernieBro Cult.
So, we have to see what happens on Tuesday. I’m hoping this puts the Sanders campaign to bed for a long summer’s sleep.
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Well, I’ve just about had it with the 2016 primary season. I’m thankful that the most no nonsense city in the country and the diversity it represents is voting next. It’s possible that both Democratic and Republican Primaries will be settled by the City that Never Sleeps and the rest of the Empire State. Bernie will continue to be hopelessly behind. Trump will inch closer to the magic number. The Atlantic seaboard will not be Cruz-friendly.
I’m going to start up with part time New Yorker Paul Krugman’s column today which adds a lot more to what BostonBoomer blogged about yesterday. He argues that Bernie Sanders has gone “over the edge” and I agree. Count me among the policy wonks in need of a neck brace after reading and listening to what passes as policy initiatives from the Sanders Campaign. The Bernie Manifesto is nothing more than a misinformed, mislabeled and supremely dated ideological rant. He’d probably fit in well with Angela Merkel’s party–if you really would like to pigeonhole him– which is Germany’s right of center party.
Also, count me as a yuggggge donor to whatever authentic Democrat primaries his damn ass for his Senate seat next time up. I’ve had it with him. His misinformed cult needs to quit defending him when he’s being indefensible.
From the beginning, many and probably most liberal policy wonks were skeptical about Bernie Sanders. On many major issues — including the signature issues of his campaign, especially financial reform — he seemed to go for easy slogans over hard thinking. And his political theory of change, his waving away of limits, seemed utterly unrealistic.
Some Sanders supporters responded angrily when these concerns were raised, immediately accusing anyone expressing doubts about their hero of being corrupt if not actually criminal. But intolerance and cultishness from some of a candidate’s supporters are one thing; what about the candidate himself?
Unfortunately, in the past few days the answer has become all too clear: Mr. Sanders is starting to sound like his worst followers. Bernie is becoming a Bernie Bro.
Let me illustrate the point about issues by talking about bank reform.
The easy slogan here is “Break up the big banks.” It’s obvious why this slogan is appealing from a political point of view: Wall Street supplies an excellent cast of villains. But were big banks really at the heart of the financial crisis, and would breaking them up protect us from future crises?
Many analysts concluded years ago that the answers to both questions were no. Predatory lending was largely carried out by smaller, non-Wall Street institutions like Countrywide Financial; the crisis itself was centered not on big banks but on “shadow banks” like Lehman Brothers that weren’t necessarily that big. And the financial reform that President Obama signed in 2010 made a real effort to address these problems. It could and should be made stronger, but pounding the table about big banks misses the point.
Yet going on about big banks is pretty much all Mr. Sanders has done. On the rare occasions on which he was asked for more detail, he didn’t seem to have anything more to offer. And this absence of substance beyond the slogans seems to be true of his positions across the board.
You could argue that policy details are unimportant as long as a politician has the right values and character. As it happens, I don’t agree. For one thing, a politician’s policy specifics are often a very important clue to his or her true character — I warned about George W. Bush’s mendacity back when most journalists were still portraying him as a bluff, honest fellow, because I actually looked at his tax proposals. For another, I consider a commitment to facing hard choices as opposed to taking the easy way out an important value in itself.
But in any case, the way Mr. Sanders is now campaigning raises serious character and values issues.
Sanders continued to blame Clinton for going on the attack and said he has simply been defending himself. And while he expressed regret for the tenor of the campaign over the previous 24 hours and said the acrimony will make it harder for Democrats to unite in the fall, he also said he does not regret his own statements.
“When somebody says that I am unqualified to be president and gives her reasoning,” Sanders said, “I think it is totally appropriate for me to respond as to why I think she may not be qualified as well. And that has to do with her views and her actions on a number of the major issues facing this country, and the way she’s run this campaign in terms of how she’s raised her money.”
Clinton had raised questions in a television interview about whether Sanders was prepared to be president, but she repeatedly stopped short of saying he was unqualified.
Some Democrats are worried about potentially longer-term fallout of an increasingly personal conflict between Sanders and Clinton. Most of those Democrats are Clinton supporters who view her eventual nomination as inevitable despite the drawn-out nomination battle with Sanders. And most blame him for the ugliness.
This is typical Bernie. He never absorbs new information that I can tell. Once he’s mind is made up on something–correct or incorrect–he appears to shut down. How on earth can anyone think that some one with that much of a closed, nonadaptive mind can be in an executive position where quick thinking on new information means life or death for large swaths of people at many points in time?
He’s totally uniformed about Banking and about Trade and those are his two signature issues. They’re his only freaking talking points and he sees no daylight between reality and the dark penances that reside only in his brain. Break up all big banks! Shutdown all trade agreements!
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has been invited to the Vatican on how to create “a moral economy,” he announced Friday morning.
“I was moved by the invitation, which was just made public today,” Sanders said during an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “I’m a big, big fan of the Pope. Obviously there are areas where we disagree on—women’s rights or gay rights—but he has played an unbelievable role, an unbelievable role of injecting a moral consequence into the economy.”
The Washington Post reported Sanders will head to Rome after his debate against Hillary Clinton on April 14. He is scheduled to speak at the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.
If you think Sanders is radical, read Pope Francis on poverty, Sanders said.
“He’s trying to inject a sense of morality into how we do economics,” he said.
So, how many times have you ever heard of the Vatican or a Pope doing that kind of invitation to a gadfly Senator running for President while attacking the most likely future President? Yea, I didn’t think so. So, get this from the Vatican: “Sanders Accused of ‘Discourtesy’ in Seeking Vatican Invitation.”
A senior Vatican official accused Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders of showing a “monumental discourtesy” in his lobbying for an invitation to a church-sponsored conference on economic and environmental issues for political purposes.
Sanders, whose foreign policy experience is under attack by rival Hillary Clinton, on Friday said he was “very excited” about being invited to the meeting hosted by a pontifical academy. It will put him at the seat of the Roman Catholic Church just four days before the New York primary.
The head of the academy said Friday that Sanders sought the invitation and that put an inappropriate political cast on the gathering.
“Sanders made the first move, for the obvious reasons,” Margaret Archer, president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, which is hosting the conference Sanders will attend, said in a telephone interview. “I think in a sense he may be going for the Catholic vote but this is not the Catholic vote and he should remember that and act accordingly — not that he will.”
Sanders’s travel to the Vatican following a debate with Clinton and just before the primary potentially injects into the Democratic nominating contest the agenda of Pope Francis, one of the most popular world leaders whose papacy is especially admired by the political progressives who play an outsized role in Democratic primaries. Archer’s response plays into criticism by Clinton of Sanders’s inexperience in diplomacy and dealing with foreign institutions, a central role of the U.S. president.
So, Bernie is now going to be an unwanted house guest who horned himself into an invitation. Not only will he be an unwanted house guest, he’ll be one that demanded a chance to finger wag at the world. Basically, the #Vatican now says #Bernie invited himself while Sanders says he was invited. They also characterized him as rude.
“Sanders cast a political shadow over a nonpolitical event by being pushy in requesting an invitation”
Only a huge ego with an overwhelming amount of gall can explain this kind of rude, ill-mannered and inconsiderate behavior. Who said that Trump was the only egomaniac in the race.
The only weirder event of the day was Bill Clinton’s exchange with BLM protesters in Philadelphia which came off directly opposed to Hillary’s position and will take tremendous ‘splaining. It seems his need to protect his legacy overwhelmed his concern for anything else including coming off as insensitive, racist and contrary to Hillary’s interests.
In a prolonged exchange Thursday afternoon, former President Bill Clinton forcefully defended his 1994 crime bill to Black Lives Matter protesters in the crowd at a Hillary Clinton campaign event.
He said the bill lowered the country’s crime rate, which benefited African-Americans, achieved bipartisan support, and diversified the police force. He then addressed a protester’s sign, saying:
“I don’t know how you would characterize the gang leaders who got 13-year-old kids hopped up on crack and sent them out onto the street to murder other African-American children,” Clinton said, addressing a protester who appeared to interrupt him repeatedly. “Maybe you thought they were good citizens …. You are defending the people who kill the lives you say matter. Tell the truth. You are defending the people who cause young people to go out and take guns.”
After a protester interrupted him repeatedly, Bill Clinton began to take on that critique directly, making the claim that his crime bill was being given a bad rap.
“Here’s what happened,” Clinton said. “Let’s just tell the whole story.”
“I had an assault weapons ban in it [the crime bill]. I had money for inner-city kids, for out of school activities. We had 110,000 police officers so we could keep people on the street, not in these military vehicles, and the police would look like the people they were policing. We did all that. And [Joe] Biden [then senator and chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee] said, you can’t pass this bill, the Republicans will kill it, if you don’t put more sentencing in it.”
“I talked to a lot of African-American groups,” Clinton continued. “They thought black lives matter. They said take this bill, because our kids are being shot in the street by gangs. We have 13-year-old kids planning their own funerals.”
Throughout the spirited defense of his policy, Clinton continued to be interrupted, and he repeatedly seemed to single out one protester.
“She doesn’t wanna hear any of that,” Clinton said to the protester. “You know what else she doesn’t want to hear? Because of that bill, we have a 25-year low in crime, a 33-year low in murder rate. And because of that and the background check law, we had a 46-year low in the deaths of people by gun violence, and who do you think those lives were? That mattered? Whose lives were saved that mattered?”
For several minutes, the discussion of the crime bill, Clinton’s exchange with the protester and the crowd’s attempts to yell and chant over her were missing one thing: any mention of Hillary Clinton, the one Clinton running for president this election cycle.
Bill Clinton did finally address her. “Hillary didn’t vote for that bill, because she wasn’t in the Senate,” Clinton said. “She was spending her time trying to get health care for poor kids [referencing her advocacy for the Children’s Health Insurance Program]. Who were they? And their lives mattered. And her opponent [Bernie Sanders] did vote for it. But I don’t blame him either … There were enough Republicans in the Senate to kill this bill, and nobody wanted it to die. That’s what happened.”
“But she [Hillary Clinton] was the first candidate, the first one to say let’s get these people who did nonviolent offenses out of prison,” Clinton continued. “And guess what? A lot of Republicans agreed. They know they made a mistake.”
Still, Clinton continued for some time defending his own administration. Twitter blew up over the situation and it will undoubtedly be a topic of conversation for a few days.
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders on Monday agreed to face off in a prime-time debate in Brooklyn, New York, on April 14, five days before the state’s crucial primary.
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer will host the presidential forum, scheduled for 9 to 11 p.m. Eastern time at the Duggal Greenhouse in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The event will be CNN’s seventh time hosting a Republican or Democratic debate during this election cycle. The agreement put to rest days of public and private back-and-forth between the two campaigns about if and when a debate would take place before New Yorkers head to the polls April 19.
I promise I will have a huge Bronx Cheer for Bernie. I’m looking forward to him being hit on his undying love for gun manufacturers and his lack of knowledge on the actual workings of Dodd-Frank. Please New York! Send this man back to the most obscure part of Vermont possible. Join us!!!
A massive leak of documents exposes the offshore holdings of 12 current and former world leaders and reveals how associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin secretly shuffled as much as $2 billion through banks and shadow companies.
The leak also provides details of the hidden financial dealings of 128 more politicians and public officials around the world.
The cache of 11.5 million records shows how a global industry of law firms and big banks sells financial secrecy to politicians, fraudsters and drug traffickers as well as billionaires, celebrities and sports stars.
These are among the findings of a yearlong investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and more than 100 other news organizations.
The files expose offshore companies controlled by the prime ministers of Iceland and Pakistan, the king of Saudi Arabia and the children of the president of Azerbaijan.
They also include at least 33 people and companies blacklisted by the U.S. government because of evidence that they’d been involved in wrongdoing, such as doing business with Mexican drug lords, terrorist organizations like Hezbollah or rogue nations like North Korea and Iran.
One of those companies supplied fuel for the aircraft that the Syrian government used to bomb and kill thousands of its own citizens, U.S. authorities have charged.
“These findings show how deeply ingrained harmful practices and criminality are in the offshore world,” said Gabriel Zucman, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley and author of “The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens.” Zucman, who was briefed on the media partners’ investigation, said the release of the leaked documents should prompt governments to seek “concrete sanctions” against jurisdictions and institutions that peddle offshore secrecy.
Que the James Bond theme. The Guardianappears to be the paper that’s most on top of the story. I’ve had a fascination with s0-called Treasure Isles for some time which offshore investment accounts of the world’s richest people since it appeared Mitt Romney had managed to plant some money offshore. This was revealed during his run for President. Most of the leaked accounts are from world leaders who are stealing their nation’s Treasury and probably take bribes. Nothing says I hate my country more than these things.
I’ve actually written about this before here because it is so fascinating. As a former banker and a financial economist that studies the financial systems, I can state with assurance that this situation plagues nations trying to develop because it takes much needed money out of circulation in the country. It also is a major argument against giving the richest any more money. They just take it straight out of the country where they gamble on the world’s financial markets. Most of them couldn’t create a job if their life depended on it because they’re busy hiding their fortunes.
The Guardian, working with global partners, will set out details from the first tranche of what are being called “the Panama Papers”. Journalists from more than 80 countries have been reviewing 11.5m files leaked from the database of Mossack Fonseca, the world’s fourth biggest offshore law firm.
The records were obtained from an anonymous source by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists with the Guardian and the BBC.
Though there is nothing unlawful about using offshore companies, the files raise fundamental questions about the ethics of such tax havens – and the revelations are likely to provoke urgent calls for reforms of a system that critics say is arcane and open to abuse.
The Panama Papers reveal:
Twelve national leaders are among 143 politicians, their families and close associates from around the world known to have been using offshore tax havens.
A $2bn trail leads all the way to Vladimir Putin. The Russian president’s best friend – a cellist called Sergei Roldugin – is at the centre of a scheme in which money from Russian state banks is hidden offshore. Some of it ends up in a ski resort where in 2013 Putin’s daughter Katerina got married.
Among national leaders with offshore wealth are Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s prime minister; Ayad Allawi, ex-interim prime minister and former vice-president of Iraq; Petro Poroshenko, president of Ukraine; Alaa Mubarak, son of Egypt’s former president; and the prime minister of Iceland, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson.
In the UK, six members of the House of Lords, three former Conservative MPs and dozens of donors to British political parties have had offshore assets.
The families of at least eight current and former members of China’s supreme ruling body, the politburo, have been found to have hidden wealth offshore.
Twenty-three individuals who have had sanctions imposed on them for supporting the regimes in North Korea, Zimbabwe, Russia, Iran and Syria have been clients of Mossack Fonseca. Their companies were harboured by the Seychelles, the British Virgin Islands, Panama and other jurisdictions.
A key member of Fifa’s powerful ethics committee, which is supposed to be spearheading reform at world football’s scandal-hit governing body, acted as a lawyer for individuals and companies recently charged with bribery and corruption.
One leaked memorandum from a partner of Mossack Fonseca said: “Ninety-five per cent of our work coincidentally consists in selling vehicles to avoid taxes.”
The company has flatly denied any wrongdoing. It says it has acted beyond reproach for 40 years and that it has had robust due diligence procedures.
The document leak comes from the records of the firm, which was founded in 1977. The information is near live, with the most recent records dating from December 2015.
The data shared with journalists is huge and is more than was leaked by WikiLeaks in 2010 or Edward Snowden in 2013.
The firm’s leaked records offer a glimpse into the tightly guarded world of high-end South Florida real estate and the global economic forces reshaping Miami’s skyline.
And MF’s activities bolster an argument analysts and law-enforcement officials have long made: Money from people linked to wrongdoing abroad is helping to power the gleaming condo towers rising on South Florida’s waterfront and pushing home prices far beyond what most locals canafford.
The leak comes as the U.S. government unleashes an unprecedented crackdown on money laundering in Miami’s luxury real-estate market.
Buried in the 11.5 million documents? A registry revealing Mateus 5’s true owner: Paulo Octávio Alves Pereira, a Brazilian developer and politician now under indictment for corruption in his home country.
A Miami Herald analysis of the never-before-seen records found 19 foreign nationals creating offshore companies and buying Miami real estate. Of them, eight have been linked to bribery, corruption, embezzlement, tax evasion or other misdeeds in their home countries.
That’s a drop in the ocean of Miami’s luxury market. But Mossack Fonseca is one of many firms that set up offshore companies. And experts say a lack of controls on cash real-estate deals has made Miami a magnet for questionable currency.
Iceland’s prime minister is this week expected to face calls in parliament for a snap election after the Panama Papers revealed he is among several leading politicians around the world with links to secretive companies in offshore tax havens.
The financial affairs of Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson and his wife have come under scrutiny because of details revealed in documents from a Panamanian law firm that helps clients protect their wealth in secretive offshore tax regimes. The files from Mossack Fonseca form the biggest ever data leak to journalists.
Opposition leaders have this weekend been discussing a motion calling for a general election – in effect a confidence vote in the prime minister.
On Monday, Gunnlaugsson is expected to face allegations from opponents that he has hidden a major financial conflict of interest from voters ever since he was elected an MP seven years ago.
This should be huge and there’s no doubt that a number of Americans may show up . It should also spur a movement for regulation if the Dems give good spin and the Republicans cower from fear of their angered populist base. I want to spend more time analyzing this and will provide you with some more thoughts when I can. I’ll be with students the next few days so you’ll have to be patient and let me know if you’re interested.
The Panama Papers leak began, according to ICIJ director Ryle, in late 2014, when an unknown source reached out to the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung, which had reported previously on a smaller leak of Mossack Fonseca files to German government regulators. A Suddeutsche Zeitung reporter named Bastian Oberway says that the source contacted him via encrypted chat, offering some sort of data intended “to make these crimes public.” But the source warned that his or her “life is in danger,” was only willing to communicate via encrypted channels, and refused to meet in person.
“How much data are we talking about?” Obermayer asked
“More than you have ever seen,” the source responded, according to Obermayer.
Obermayer tells WIRED he communicated with his source over a series of encrypted channels that they frequently changed, each time deleting all history from their prior exchange. He alludes to crypto apps like Signal and Threema, as well as PGP-encrypted email but declines to say specifically which methods they used. Each time the reporter and source re-established a connection, they would use a known question and answer to reauthenticate each other. “I’d say ‘is it sunny?’ You’d say ‘the moon is raining’ or whatever nonsense, and then both of us can verify it’s still the other person on the device,” Obermayer says.
I can’t wait to follow the money frankly. International Financial Economists try to estimate the flows of dark and black currency around the world and its impact on a nation’s capital accounts. This may give us a hint of the level and types of activities as well as their frequency. Like I said, I’m chomping at the bit like an Ann Romney dressage horse to get the actual activity details. Meanwhile, enjoy the international outing of the billionaires who have more in common with each other than the people in their countries.
Anyway, here’s a few other links to keep you busy!
Voters in Wisconsin’s Republican primary Tuesday can choose among Donald Trump, John Kasich and Ted Cruz, all of whom promise tax cuts that could cost as much as $10 trillion in revenue over 10 years — and an ensuing economic boom as spending is unleashed. Yet voters need look no further than Louisiana, Kansas and Oklahoma to see what happens when economies fail to grow as promised.
In a unanimous result, the court said a state can draw legislative districts based on total population. At issue in the case was the “one person, one vote” principle dating back to the 1960s, when the court held that state legislative districts must be drawn so they are equal in population.
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Well, I’m holding down the fort today! Both BB and JJ are off surfing samsara which is my little way of saying they’re dealing with a series of life’s little unpleasantness. That seems to be the order of the day. There’s a war on life’s pleasantries out there! The majority of us are losing the fight.
So, I watched the Republican Townhall last night. One hour with each of them is an hour wasted in Bizarro. Ted Cruz is a sociopath. He dodged all questions choosing to spin a series of anecdotes with no relation to the question asked by Anderson Cooper or the participants. The fact he thought these anecdotes charming given his self congratulatory manner–when they definitely were not–says a lot about his inability to even fake being human for short periods of time. He’s positively reptilian. Donald Trump is walking, savage ID. He has no conception of anything remotely related to the rest of the world that hasn’t been directly in his face and interests. The sentence I bolded below pretty much sums the Trump exchange.
During a CNN town-hall forum Tuesday night, Donald Trump reiterated the falsehood that Sen. Ted Cruz was responsible for spreading around an image of his wife Melania in a nude pose. “I thought it was a nice picture of Heidi,” Trump said of an image he retweeted clearly meant to make her look unattractive compared to his wife. “Come on,” Anderson Cooper responded. “I thought it was fine,” Trump insisted. Continuing to deny culpability, he said “I didn’t start it.” Cooper sensibly retorted, “That’s the argument of a 5-year-old.”
That sentence pretty much sums up the behavior of most of the politicians associated with the Republican Party who basically have not been doing their actual jobs for some time. They won’t examine or confirm SCOTUS nominees. They continually vote to get rid of the ACA when they know the bill will go no where. They are obsessed with Planned Parenthood based on outright lies. They deny the impact and causes of Climate Science. It’s the behavior of a 5-year-old that doesn’t get his way.
The unraveling of the Republican party is not good for this country. Candidates like Ted Cruz and Donald Trump are signs that something has gone supremely wrong. Kasich appears to be the only sane one left unless you count Rubio who seems to be angling to hold on to his delegates in some weird hope that a brokered convention will anoint him. Both may be sane. Neither are presidential material. Rubio is dumb and Kasich wanders that ethereal wasteland between being pragmatic and preaching radical religious right sermons worthy of any common religious fanatic.
It is a full on war between the Republican Establishment and the white, working class base it has used as a foil to push through bad tax policy since the Pied Piper of Hollywood spun a tune to romance them into the Republican fold. Ronald Reagan’s dogwhistles and tales of a white utopia, a city on the hill, enticed them to vote Republican for a few decades. Dubya’s uncanny ability to sound homespun and create wars to appeal to their patriotic nature may have held them for awhile. But now they are unleashed with wide open eyes and a distaste of all things Romneyesque. The want real brutes. Karl Rove no longer can manipulate their lesser angels with empty promises and heads. They want the real deal.
If you listen to establishment gurus, you’d be led to believe that the Republican primary voter revolt was birthed by the governance of President Obama, creating fertile ground for the emergence of one Donald Trump. This fairy tale version of reality casts Trump as the villain who has swept in to capitalize on voter frustration with Obama’s alleged weakness, lawlessness and rampant liberalism.
The villain must be stopped or the Republican Party will be destroyed. Or so we are told.
The old saw that you have to first acknowledge that you have a problem to solve the problem applies here. What the GOP “leaders” refuse to accept is that Trump is not the problem. They are.
The dissatisfaction among a large cohort of GOP voters is directly attributable to their unhappiness with a party that they believe does not represent their interests. In exit polls, high percentages of GOP voters registered displeasure with their leadership. In Tennessee, 58% of Republican voters said they felt “betrayed” by their leaders, as did 47% in New Hampshire, 52% in South Carolina and 54% in Ohio.
Those who feel betrayed have been most likely to vote for Trump. Trump has been a particular draw to white working-class voters who feel left behind economically. Such voters have been treated with dismissal and outright contempt by the GOP establishment even as this group has become more critical to Republican success. Pew reported in 2012 that “lower-income and less educated whites … have shifted substantially toward the Republican Party since 2008.”
In other words, their peasants are revolting. Given this, how can the party’s elite make their way through a brokered convention when the party itself is so positively unmoored? Its main policy goal is tax avoidance for the very wealthy. After that’s accomplished, they throw bits and pieces of radical religious bills at the wall to see what will stick while railing against minorities, women, and immigrants.
The modern Republican Party has devolved into a tax avoidance scam for rich people. The scam is a masterpiece of psychological manipulation, in which the racial, cultural and economic anxieties of (mostly white) voters are exploited, in order to get those voters to support policies that transfer ever-greater percentages of wealth from themselves to the top 0.1 percent.
It really isn’t any more complicated than that. Everything else – the “culture wars,” the continual hysteria about terrorism, the non-stop rhetoric about how the mainstream media, the universities, the scientists, and basically the rest of the modern world are all biased against conservatives – it’s all just so much noise, designed to solve the tricky problem of how to get ordinary people to support economic policies that make them poorer and rich people richer.
You couldn’t come up with a better illustration of this principle than the ongoing GOP campaign to eliminate the estate tax. Last year the House voted to get rid of it, and a majority of Republican senators have pledged to do the same.
The Republican propaganda machine has waged a multi-decade war against the estate tax, which it has rebranded the “death tax.” Because of these efforts, the tax has been watered down to the point where, under current law, only a tiny group of wealthy people will ever pay any estate taxes at all.
But of course that isn’t enough, since it means that some taxes still have to be paid on truly enormous inheritances, and protecting the economic interests of people who have a net worth in the eight, nine, 10 or 11 figures is the contemporary GOP’s entire reason for being.
Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Free Press
The emergence of Trump as a leading Republican candidate is something found incredulous by enabling media types who have been equivocating between Democrats and Republicans for some time. They’ve refused to hold any one accountable for outright lies.
One of the most amazing things to see is the panic in our allies as major Republican candidates want to dump NATO, dally with war crimes and nuclear weapons, and ignore treaties and trade agreements. That’s how equivocal Republicans and Democrats really are from the view here on USA Main Street. The one thing that’s been fairly consistent in American governance is the respect for pre-existing foreign agreements and diplomacy. Each President–even while holding different visions of the country–basically finds value in remaining on a stable and predictable path in foreign affairs. The Republican historical area of expertise used to be foreign policy until now.
Lobbyists in Washington say they are being flooded with questions and concerns from foreign governments about the rise of Donald Trump.Officials around the globe are closely following the U.S. presidential race, to the point where some have asked their American lobbyists to explain, in great detail, what a contested GOP convention would look like. There is nothing conservative about Trump or the Republican party these days other than their tax avoidance schemes. They are a party of insurgents and radicals hellbent on an agenda to turn back modernity.
The questions about Trump are “almost all-consuming,” said Richard Mintz, the managing director of Washington-based firm The Harbour Group, whose client list includes the governments of Georgia and the United Arab Emirates.
After a recent trip to London, Abu Dhabi and Beijing, “it’s fair to say that all anyone wants to talk about is the U.S. presidential election,” Mintz added. “People are confused and perplexed.”
The Hill conducted interviews with more than a half-dozen lobbyists, many of whom said they are grappling with how to explain Trump and his unusual foreign policy views to clients who have a lot riding on their relationship with the United States.
“We’re in uncharted territory here,” said one lobbyist with foreign government clients who asked not to be identified.
“The questions coming from the international community are not different than the things, categorically, we’re asking ourselves,” said Nathan Daschle, the president and chief operating officer of the Daschle Group, a firm run by his father, former Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.).
“There’s an added level of bafflement because this is not the United States that they’ve been living with for so long,” Daschle said. “This is not the image the United States has been projecting.”
The questions about Trump often concern his foreign policy positions.
The businessman has boasted about keeping his options open on many crucial foreign policy questions, including on trade, troop-sharing agreements and the U.S. posture toward China.
“I don’t want to say what I’d do because, again, we need unpredictability,” Trump told The New York Times in an interview published over the weekend.
A second lobbyist who represents countries in Latin America, Asia and the Muslim world said answers like that have made Trump a “wild card” for leaders around the world.
“Nobody knows whether he believes anything of what he says because he’s changed his position so many times,” the lobbyist said.
Some of Trump’s comments — especially about Mexico, Muslims and trade with countries such as Japan and China — have also angered foreign leaders.
A third lobbyist for governments in Asia said part of his job has been telling countries how to react to some of Trump’s controversial remarks.
“If you come out and blast Donald Trump — for the people who are going to vote for Donald Trump, that could make them like him more,” the lobbyist, who also represents foreign companies with a large presence in the U.S., said he has told foreign leaders.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe torture can be justified to extract information from suspected terrorists, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, a level of support similar to that seen in countries like Nigeria where militant attacks are common.
The poll reflects a U.S. public on edge after the massacre of 14 people in San Bernardino in December and large-scale attacks in Europe in recent months, including a bombing claimed by the militant group Islamic State last week that killed at least 32 people in Belgium.
Donald Trump, the front-runner for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, has forcefully injected the issue of whether terrorism suspects should be tortured into the election campaign.
Hillary Clinton says foreign leaders are privately reaching out to her to ask if they can endorse her to stop Donald Trump from becoming president of the United States.
“I am already receiving messages from leaders,” Clinton told an Ohio audience at a Democratic presidential town hall on Sunday night.
“I’m having foreign leaders ask if they can endorse me to stop Donald Trump.”
He’s suggested using economic warfare to halt China’s territorial moves in the South China Sea and raised the prospect of a fundamental reconsideration of nuclear doctrine by musing about South Korea and Japan acquiring their own atomic arsenal. He says the U.S. should boycott Saudi Arabian oil if the kingdom doesn’t send ground troops to fight ISIS and believes NATO is an anachronism. And he warns he will renegotiate bedrock free trade deals, a prospect that could send serious reverberations through the global economy.
“It is rattling the windows of foreign ministries all over the world,” said CNN’s senior political analyst David Gergen, who has worked for a string of Democratic and Republican presidents.
Trump has gone to great lengths over the past week to explain his foreign policy views, which are often criticized as overly vague. He’s participated in extensive interviews with The Washington Post and The New York Times and delivered a speech — notable because it was carefully pre-written — to the leading pro-Israel group in Washington. He’ll have another opportunity to address foreign policy Tuesday night during a CNN town hall in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
The interviews reveal Trump as someone who is just as willing to flout the foreign policy establishment as he is the GOP elite. His statements appear to fly in the face of the longstanding assumption underlying U.S. foreign policy — that supporting allies financially, diplomatically and militarily promotes a global system of unfettered free trade, democracy and stability that is overwhelmingly in the national interests of the United States.
As the embodiment of this truculence, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, today finding favor among Republicans desperate to derail Donald Trump’s bid for the GOP nomination, stands alone. From the very outset of his candidacy, Cruz has depicted himself as the one genuinely principled conservative in the race. And in comparison to Trump, who is ideologically sui generis, Cruz does qualify as something of a conservative. When it comes to foreign policy, however, Cruz offers not principles but—like Trump himself—raw pugnacity.
Cruz has gone out of his way to deride the pretensions of democracy promoters, mocking “crazy neocon invade-every-country-on-earth” types wanting to “send our kids to die in the Middle East.” On the stump, Cruz advertises himself as Reagan’s one-and-only true heir. As such, he endorses “the clarity of Reagan’s four most important words: ‘We win, they lose.’” Upon closer examination, Cruz is actually advocating something quite different: “We win, they lose, then we walk away.”
The key to “winning” is to unleash American military might. “If I am elected president, we will utterly destroy ISIS,” Cruz vows. “We won’t weaken them. We won’t degrade them. We will utterly destroy them. We will carpet-bomb them into oblivion…. We will do everything necessary so that every militant on the face of the earth will know…if you wage jihad and declare war on America, you are signing your death warrant.”
Yet rather than Reaganesque, Cruz’s prescription for dealing with Islamist radicalism represents a throwback to bomb-them-back-to-the-Stone-Age precepts pioneered by Gen. Curtis LeMay and endorsed by the likes of Barry Goldwater back when obliteration was in fashion. The embryonic Cruz Doctrine offers an approximation of total war. “I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out!” he promises with evident enthusiasm.
Nowhere, however, does his outlook take into account costs, whether human, fiscal, or moral. Nor does it weigh the second-order consequences of, say, rendering large parts of Iraq and Syria a smoking ruin or of killing large numbers of noncombatants through campaigns of indiscriminate bombing. In essence, Cruz sees force as a way to circumvent history—a prospect that resonates with Americans annoyed by history’s stubborn complexities.
Kasich has survived so far by keeping his head down and winning his home state of Ohio. But now that he is one of only three candidates remaining in the race, the former congressman and current Governor of Ohio will face the kind of media scrutiny that he has managed to avoid since he announced his candidacy. It will show that he is an outright mediocrity.
Kasich served on the House Armed Services Committee for eighteen years, where his strong beliefs on fiscal responsibility and budget cutting earned him the moniker of the “cheap hawk.” He accomplished next to nothing, apart from limiting the procurement of B-2 bombers.
During his long tenure in Congress, Kasich casted a number of votes on war-and-peace issues, voting for the Gulf War in 1991 but opposing Ronald Reagan’s decision in 1983 to send U.S. Marines to Lebanon for a peacekeeping mission. He reminds voters during town hall meetings and debates that the United States should get out of the business of nation-building and should stay far away from manufacturing democracies around the world. But he also floated the preposterous idea that the way to stop ISIS in its tracks is for the next president to create a new government agency to “beam messages around the globe” about the American credo of liberty.
At times, it is difficult to pinpoint what kind of foreign policy doctrine a potential President John Kasich would follow. He’s asserted that Russian President Vladimir Putin has gotten away with far too much during the Obama administration, including his annexation of the Crimean Peninsula, his military and economic support to separatist forces in eastern Ukraine, and his decision to send fighter jets into Syria to strengthen the defenses of Bashar al-Assad’s regime. “[I]t’s time that we punched the Russians in the nose,” Kasich told radio host Hugh Hewitt during a December presidential debate. “They’ve gotten away with too much in this world, and we need to stand up against them . . . in Eastern Europe where they threaten some of our most precious allies.”
On other issues, like the nuclear agreement with Iran, Kasich has oscillated between common sense (“You’re going to rip it up and then what?”), depressed resignation (“I’m sort of sick to my stomach about it because . . . Iran’s going to get a ton of money”) to defiant opposition (“if I were president, I would call them and say, I’m sorry, but we’re suspending this agreement”). With respect to the Islamic State, Kasich has emphasized coalition building with Arab allies similar to George H.W. Bush’s alliance building during the Persian Gulf War—a safe position that is just muscular enough to pass muster with Republican voters, but benign enough that it wouldn’t raise the eyebrows of realists who call the party home.
The looming question is whether John Kasich is hawkish enough for the GOP foreign policy establishment, a club that has been heavily influenced by neoconservative thinking for the past fifteen years.
At least “outright mediocrity” wont scare the children. It won’t scare ISIS either.
It’s been incredible to watch Bernie Sanders with his generalities and overreaching promises dodge serious foreign policies questions through out the Democratic Debates. He tends to fall back on insisting that his vote against the Iran Resolution just says it all. It doesn’t, however. His generalities fall way short of Clinton’s recall of names and her credentials as the nation’s chief foreign policy negotiator. I have to say that I learn a little bit more about the entire world each time she steps to the podium and takes a foreign policy question or makes a foreign policy speech.
Imagine what the debates and town halls in the general will look like when she takes on one of these candidates from the party in total disarray. My guess is that entire countries will be cheering for her.
I should close here but I’d like to share this with you so you can see that she will be our candidate for the fall despite the bleating and chest thumping of the cult of Bern. Here’s Nate Silver’s estimate of Bernie’s long shot path from today. It is beyond improbable that he can get 988 more pledged delegates and romance the Super D’s. Yes, there is one more campaign out there in Bizarro and it’s not a Republican one.
If you’re a Sanders supporter, you might look at the map and see some states — Oregon, Rhode Island, West Virginia, Montana and so forth — that look pretty good for Sanders, a lot like the ones that gave Sanders landslide wins earlier in the campaign. But those states have relatively few delegates. Instead, about 65 percent of the remaining delegates are in California, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland — all states where Sanders trails Clinton in the polls and sometimes trails her by a lot.
To reach a pledged delegate majority, Sanders will have to win most of the delegates from those big states. A major loss in any of them could be fatal to his chances. He could afford to lose one or two of them narrowly, but then he’d need to make up ground elsewhere — he’d probably have to win California by double digits, for example.
Sanders will also need to gain ground on Clinton in a series of medium-sized states such as Wisconsin, Indiana, Kentucky and New Mexico. Demographics suggest that these states could be close, but close won’t be enough for Sanders. He’ll need to win several of them easily.
None of this is all that likely. Frankly, none of it is at all likely. If the remaining states vote based on the same demographic patterns established by the previous ones, Clinton will probably gain further ground on Sanders. If they vote as state-by-state polling suggests they will, Clinton could roughly double her current advantage over Sanders and wind up winning the nomination by 400 to 500 pledged delegates.
The nation and the world should breathe a collective sigh of relief when Clinton wins the nomination and the presidency. The alternatives to Hillary are the stuff of national nightmares. In fact, they would be a global nightmare and the majority of the US and the world knows it.
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We’re beginning to make that transition from primary season to the lull before the General Election. I thought I’d celebrate the shift with some reads that signal the shift or should signal the shift. I’ve really been struck by the number of people that really don’t understand how parties choose their candidates and seem to be following the overall results on a state by state basis even when that state basically doesn’t add much to the delegate count. The other thing that’s rather astounding is the number of people that seem to think that a party sponsored election for delegates is akin to a normal election. This is when I really feel the irony of the situation.
We have two outsider populist candidates running for election within a party system. Neither of them has been either active or genuine members of that party. Their followers are apoplectic by the scent of cigars in the backrooms and conventions of the state and national parties. I’m being somewhat cynical in that I think both of these candidates had to realize at some point that the parties were not going to be all that accommodating to them running amok. Their voters, however, appear to be completely stumped and angered because it’s pretty much the kind of behavior that has driven them straight to the arms of populist charlatans.
So by now, you’ve figured out that it’s Bernie and Trump and their voters with the lack of knowledge and understanding of primary and party dynamics. Let me get started by saying that I’ve always supported a national set of primaries with openness to any party that can get to some kind of threshold TBD. I have felt that they should be regulated by the Feds to ensure that no one is disenfranchised and that they should be in keeping with the spirit of the Voting Rights Act. So this viewpoint is not in the interest of the duopoly that is our two party system, It’s also not in keeping with the philosophy of the party that loves “local control” and “states’ rights”.
Irony is not lost on me when I read that Trump is talking about suing the State of Louisiana over the tricks that the Cruz campaign pulled at the party convention. His voters tend to hate big gubermint, yet it’s federal control of primary elections that would eliminate these back channel deals. The problem in Louisiana is basically the delegates won by Marco Rubio. Rubio suspended his campaign. He has delegates that were basically elected but they now have a dead candidate. They’ve essentially become free agents as zombie delegates.
Following a report that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) may win more delegates in Louisiana’s primary than Donald Trump, even though Trump won the state, the Republican presidential frontrunner threatened to file a lawsuit on Sunday.
Trump complained about the “rotten political system” during a Sunday interview on ABC’s “This Week.”
“The Republican tabulation system is a broken system. It’s not fair,” he said.
“I won Louisiana and now I hear he’s trying to steal delegates,” Trump added, referring to Cruz. “What’s going on in the Republican Party is a disgrace. I have so many more votes and so many more delegates.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, Republican in Louisiana expect the five unbound delegates that had been awarded to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) to back Cruz now that the Florida senator is out of the race. Cruz’s supporters have also secured key positions on convention committees, which could help the Texas senator at a contested convention, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Jason Doré, the executive director of the Louisiana Republican primary, told the Times-Picayune that the party is “really confident in the rules” and is prepared for a lawsuit from Trump.
Doré said that any disagreement over Rubio’s delegates is “is between Mr. Trump and those guys,” and added that the delegates have not yet made any final decision.
“Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd took on the issue Sunday of why Donald Trump needs to score a first-ballot win at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland this summer.
The reason?
Delegates who may support Trump on the first ballot, but could abandon him after that.
Donald Trump is in a race to 1,237. It’s a number now we’re all getting used to and familiar with. And he can’t afford to miss hitting that magic number. And here’s why. Because there’s already an effort underway to stop him on a second ballot at the convention in Cleveland. Right now, Trump has 752 delegates and a 282 delegate lead over Ted Cruz.
In order to hit the magic 1,237 majority number and earn that glide path the nomination, Trump has to win 54 percent of the remaining delegates. And he has some favorable contests coming up, like his home state of New York, which has 95 delegates up for grabs, and a winner-take-all state of New Jersey, where maybe his buddy Chris Christie can help him win those 51 delegates.
But, the race is already on to create sort of delegate double agents. If Trump fails to win that majority on the first ballot these are people who will promise to dump Trump on the second ballot. And then there’s an effort underway to mobilize zombie delegates. These are delegates who are pledged to candidates who have dropped out of the race.
They could switch their vote over to someone else in the race, maybe even on the first ballot. Maybe it’s Cruz, maybe it’s Trump. So to discuss all of this, I’m joined by our resident zombie expert, Ben Ginsberg, Republican delegate guru, who served, of course, as lead counsel to the Bush/Cheney campaign of 2000 and he was Mitt Romney’s lawyer in 2012. So the zombie apocalypse will hit Cleveland.
So we have free-agent delegates, we have zombie delegates. I want to talk about the free-agent delegates first, because we have Donald Trump this morning already angry about this. Louisiana, he wins the primary big, he should get a lion’s share of the delegates. The Cruz campaign claims they actually are going to have more delegates out of Louisiana, a state they lost, than Trump. How did they do it? Explain.
BEN GINSBERG:
The way they managed to do it is that 44 of the 56 states and territories give the candidates no role in choosing who the delegates will pick.
CHUCK TODD:
Who the individuals are.
BEN GINSBERG:
Who the individuals are. And so a well-organized campaign will go into all these state conventions and state executive committee meetings and manage to get supporters of theirs. They’ll be bound on the first ballot to the winner of their state primary, but not for any of the procedural rules issues, and not for the second ballot.
CHUCK TODD:
All right. So they’re the double agents. Now, let’s talk about zombie delegates. These are the people, and I want to put up a graphic here. There are a group of unbound delegates. We know there were always going to be over about a hundred, we’ve done the math here, over about a hundred of them, 169 of them come from states that have chosen not to hold a contest, Colorado chief among them. And then there’s another 175 of the zombie delegates. These are people, mostly Marco Rubio delegates out of Virginia and Minnesota, but there a handful of Carson, maybe one or two Jeb Bush’s. What is their role in all of this?
Bernie’s issues are different. He’s way behind but his campaign has decided to try to hype up his supporters, continue fundraising, and whine about the delegate math set up by the Democratic Party. We’ve been seeing the Deadenders for Bernie for some time now. It’s been basically over since the Steel Magnolias of the South Sung. But, we’ve been seeing all kinds of attempts by the campaign to spin a different tune. Sanders–who was once berating superdelegates–has been actively courting them. However, that’s backfiring according to Reuters. It seems that we have more instances of BernieBro Bullying.
Interviews with 10 of the 505 super delegates supporting Clinton Reuters has reached show that nine of them have been approached by people purporting to back Sanders, and nearly all were displeased by the tone of the outreach.
Isabel Framer of Ohio, a superdelegate for Clinton, for example, got a voice mail last week urging her to vote for Sanders “in accordance with the will of the people.”
On the voice mail, heard by Reuters, the anonymous male caller says: “I think it’s crap that you get to vote whichever way you want… I’ll be watching your vote.”
“I’m not easily frightened,” Framer told Reuters. “I’m not going to change a vote over threats.”
Akilah Ensley, a North Carolina superdelegate, said she started hearing more often from Sanders supporters after her name appeared on a Wikipedia list noting her support for Clinton. “Some of them were nice, and some were rather abrasive,” she said, adding “attacking my decisions is probably not the best way” to change her mind.
Luis Heredia, an Arizona superdelegate for Clinton, said he has received over 30 phone calls, emails and instant messages from Sanders supporters. “The majority of them are more angry, and the tone is more demanding,” Heredia said.
Lacy Johnson, an Indiana superdelegate backing Clinton, meanwhile, said he had received a mix of messages, including one that he said threatened: “we will make you pay.”
Andres Ramirez, a political consultant in Las Vegas, Nevada, and a superdelegate supporting Clinton, said in the past campaigns would typically try to soft-sell their candidates rather than use pressure tactics.
“The way this has gone down, in my experience, has never happened before,” said.
Sanders continues to attack the party which probably isn’t the best approach when wooing party insiders.
“Bernie’s campaign is focused on reaching out to all voters and earning delegates at primaries and caucuses,” he said in a statement, stressing that the Sanders campaign was not coordinating with supporters to contact superdelegates.
However, the unofficial push could complicate the U.S. Senator from Vermont’s efforts to woo the critical bloc in the coming months.
The effort has at times taken an angry tone, some of the messages reviewed by Reuters showed, reflecting the anti-establishment tinge of the 2016 presidential race where many voters are unhappy with Washington insiders.
Some 85 percent of the 4,763 delegate votes to the Democratic National Convention that will decide who will face a Republican rival in the November election are determined by the results of states’ nominating contests. But the remaining 15 percent are held by superdelegates, who get to vote however they like – meaning they could hold the key to a tight contest.
Superdelegates are made up of party leaders and elected Senators, members of Congress, and governors. The Democratic party adopted the system in the early 1980s as a way of giving party leaders more control over the nominating process, though they have yet to play a decisive role in a nomination.
“The idea there is that you’ve got people who have a long view … who have, arguably, the best interests of the party at heart,” said Terri Fine, a professor of political science at the University of Central Florida.
Bernie’s folks continue to see all states and all primary efforts as equal. The Michigan win may have been meaningful, but this weekend’s Western Caucuses were not. I’ve had to continually remind my Bernie friends that the Washington Caucus gave the state win to Howard Dean AFTER he’d lost the election. But, hope and not math, springs eternal with these folks who still keep pouring money down the Bernie Drain. It is going to give us about a week of insufferable Bernie worship.
Hillary’s popular vote lead was almost identical before and after Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii voted.
According to the website RealClearPolitics, 15.3 million Democratic primary voters had cast their ballots prior to Saturday. Of those voters, 8.9 million had voted for Hillary, and 6.4 million had voted for Bernie. This amounts to a margin of 58% vs. 42% — a blowout margin by most electoral standards.
Saturday’s voters preferred Bernie by a large margin, but these were small states. As of Sunday, official reports only showed about 60 thousand total votes in the three states, while the higher estimates of party officials still indicated fewer than 300 thousand total votes. This means that the overall popular vote remains basically unchanged: Hillary has roughly 9 million votes, while Bernie still has roughly 6 and a half million. Translated into percentages, the total effect of Bernie’s “landslide” victories was that Hillary is still winning 58% to 42%. Only if you add a decimal point does Bernie’s Western sweep even change the percentages.
There’s an awkward video of Bernie Sanders and Bernie’s interaction with his wife Jane Sanders that’s making the rounds, and it’s not a good look for Bernie. Senator Sanders was speaking in Madison, Wisconsin, when the “snub” against Jane happened. The Democratic presidential candidate spoke at a campaign stop on Saturday, March 26, with Bernie being exuberant over his recent victory — however, during that celebration, Sanders made a move against Jane that isn’t going down well over the Interwebs.
Bernie Sanders’ revolution may be growing directly from the grass roots, but he’s paying top dollar for the places where it’s coming together.
In February, the Sanders campaign, flush with cash from its small-donor network, spent $1.6 million on site rentals, ticketing and “sound/stage/lighting,” pursuing ever-larger venues for his followers to gather in, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
And the spending this month may well exceed February. On Friday, for instance, the Sanders campaign is staging a pep rally for the Washington state caucuses at Safeco Field in Seattle, the Mariners’ baseball stadium that holds up to 54,000 people.
It’s a sign that the Sanders campaign plans to keep spending big as it works to compete with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton across the board.
Now that GOP front-runner Donald Trump has released the names of some of his foreign policy advisers, it’s only a matter of time before pundits, reporters and voters start demanding to know whom he intends to pick as his vice presidential running mate.
When politely asked now, Trump responds, “I need to win the nomination first. After that, I’ll think about it.”
To the untrained eye, this seems like a reasonable answer; however, no insider I know believes The Donald hasn’t already begun to create a short list of possible candidates.
Ditto Hillary Clinton. The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has been around the block too many times not to have several running mates in mind, even if it still is March.
Most of Sen. Bernie Sanders‘ supporters in California say they expect that come November, Hillary Clinton will be elected president — and, by and large, they’re OK with that.
While both Democratic camps prepare for a final battle in the state’s June 7 primary, the latest USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times statewide poll found that just over half of Sanders’ supporters said they expected Clinton to be the next president. About a third of Sanders’ backers said they expected the Vermont senator to emerge the winner, and 12% said they thought Donald Trump would prevail.
Close to 8 in 10 Sanders supporters said in the survey that they would vote for Clinton in a race against Trump, although many said they would do so reluctantly.
Those findings show the reality underlying the still-heated rhetoric of the Democratic primaries: By contrast with the civil war that divides Republicans,Democrats in the country’s largest state have begun to coalesce behind their front-runner.
Meanwhile, Bernie is dying for more debates. The Clinton Campaign is beginning to pushback. They have little to gain if Bernie continues to attack her while each debate brings no new information to the table.
Hillary Clinton’s chief campaign strategist laid into Bernie Sanders’ camp on Monday for its insistence upon a debate before the April 19 primary in New York, remarking that the Vermont senator has reneged on his promise to avoid running a negative campaign and therefore does not get to dictate the terms of any future debates.
Appearing on CNN, Joel Benenson was asked about comments from the Sanders campaign over the weekend calling for another debate before the New York primary, though he said he did not see that as the most notable story out of the weekend. Instead, he referred to a Washington Post story in which Sanders’ campaign discussed possible efforts to sharpen rhetoric against the former secretary of state. “They’re talking about running harsher negatives now,” Benenson said, responding that he was not distracting from the issue but explaining the campaign’s stance.
“Because I think the real question is what kind of campaign is Sen. Sanders going to run going forward,” Benenson remarked. “He pumped $4 million in the weekend before March 15, and he lost all five states on March 15. They spent about $4 million running negative ads.”
“This is a man who said he’d never run a negative ad ever. He’s now running them, they’re now planning to run more,” he continued. “Let’s see the tone of the campaign he wants to run before we get to any other questions.”
CNN’s Kate Bolduan then inquired why the campaign would not agree to debate in New York despite agreeing in January to more debates. Benenson responded, “Because we agreed to debates up to a certain point. We’re now out campaigning in these states.”
“What’s the risk?” Bolduan asked.
“There’s no risk. She’s done very well in the debates. The debates have been very good, but Sen. Sanders doesn’t get to decide when we debate, particularly when he’s running a very negative campaign against us. Let’s see if he goes back to the kind of tone he said he was going to set early on. If he does that, then we’ll talk about debates,” Benenson said.
It seems that everyone but the Bernie Bros is getting tired of Bernie the Bully. Listen to the chorus of singing fat ladies instead of the songs of angry men for a change!!
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
Those of us that watched the Brooklyn Democratic Debate last night saw the campaign conversation get nasty. I was glad to see Hillary hitting back and I have to say that despite pundits calling the debate a tie, I found her to be absolutely presidential. She was tough and called him out on his constant hypocritical charges and his lies. This is Rebecca Traister writing for NYMAG.
Yes, he went there again about us Southern Democrats right there in Brooklyn on CNN in front of every one watching. I belong to a discussion group on Facebook called American Minorities for Hillary. It’s a very diverse group of minorities to include just about every category possible. I posted the same link to that board as I did down in the comments yesterday which is the second set of analysis from Maddow Blog and Steve Benen on Bernie’s comments. I can unequivocally state that all the Southern Democrats on the board of all shapes and sizes along with a lot of others recognized the tweet of a racist dog whistle.
![Harshaw_Bruennhilde[1]](https://skydancingblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/harshaw_bruennhilde1.jpg?w=590)
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