My mom just called me to find out why MSNBC is hyping the Republicans’ Benghazi! report. I’m not watching; but I guess we can just assume that the so-called “liberal” cable channel is going to continue rooting against Hillary even if it means electing a completely unqualified, ignorant racist who hates the media and wants to take away press freedoms. Ugh.
Even The New York Times admits the report contains nothing new, even though they fail to note until way down in the story that the “committee report” released today comes only from the Republican members. They didn’t even let their Democratic colleagues read it. The Democrats on the committee released their report yesterday. Here’s a quick read on what’s in the report.
After two years and $7 million, Republicans on the House Benghazi Committee have released their long-awaited report on the 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi — a report that concludes then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was not directly at fault for the events that led to the death of four American citizens.
The report did slam the Obama administration for its handling of the aftermath of the attacks, citing a combination of bureaucratic inefficiency, personal error and willful ignorance of intelligence for the bungled response. But the committee’s findings do not directly indict Clinton for the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, or found that she willfully ignored calls for security, charges that Republicans have continuously leveled at her.
In fact, the report barely focuses on Clinton at all, but rather reveals a more comprehensive timeline of events based on interviews with eyewitnesses and senior intelligence officials.
Among the revelations in the Committee’s 800-page report is that the CIA missed real-time intelligence about the situation on the ground that led the agency to bungle its response to the violent protests that led to the deaths of Americans at the US diplomatic compound in Benghazi. The government then misled the public about what had happened in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.
“It is not clear what additional intelligence would have satisfied either [State Department aide Patrick] Kennedy or the Secretary in understanding the Benghazi mission compound was at risk — short of an attack,” the report says.
There’s not much new in that article either, but you can check it out for yourself.
Protesters wave Mexican flags and signs on the road leading into Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s Trump International Golf Links in Aberdeen, Scotland, June 25, 2016. (Reuters Photo)
Hillary Clinton has reestablished her advantage over Donald Trump on dealing with terrorism following the candidates’ very different reactions to the nation’s largest-ever mass shooting in Orlando, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
By a 50-to-39 percent margin, more say they trust Clinton than Trump to handle terrorism — similar to her 54-40 edge in March but wider than her narrow three-point edge in May after Trump became the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee….
The latest shift stands in stark contrast to political impact of the last major terrorist attacks that colored U.S. politics. After the Paris and San Bernardino attacks in late 2015, Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims entering the U.S. received wide support among fellow Republicans, and it helped bolster his support heading into the GOP nomination contest.
The latest poll numbers, of course, show how the larger electorate feels about Trump’s handling of foreign policy and terrorism — not just GOP voters. And it’s yet another bad sign for Trump’s presidential aspirations come November.
Clinton isn’t the only Democrat to get a boost. President Obama’s approval for handling terrorism went from 45 percent in June to 50 percent this month, ending a stretch of underwater ratings (more disapproval than approval) since early 2015. After the Paris attacks, Obama’s approval mark on the issue dropped to a record-low 40 percent.
Read the details and check out the charts at the WaPo.
Trump has finally started sending out fundraising emails, and apparently he isn’t aware that he can’t accept donations from foreign nationals. He sent emails to Scottish MP’s last week asking them to donate. One recipient wrote a response.
McGarry, who is the MP for Glasgow East, wrote a sharp reply to the Presidential hopeful’s son, and shared her response with her 15,000 Twitter followers.
In her letter she wrote: “Quite why you think it appropriate to write emails to UK parliamentarians with a begging bowl for your father’s repugnant campaign is completely beyond me.
“Given his rhetoric on migrants, refugees and immigration, it seems quite extraordinary that he would be asking foreign nationals for money; especially people who view his dangerous divisiveness with horror.
“The US elections are a matter for the American people, but I do send my warm hope that they reject your father fundamentally at the ballot box.”
She added: “The thought of his reactionary type of politics and apparent ignorance of world affairs having access to a seat at the world table is both surreal, and terrifying.
“The above is a long way to say No, and do not contact me again.”
There’s a campaign dynamic now coming into view which under other circumstances might only be a matter of trash talk or taunt. In this unique campaign cycle, it will likely be a driving issue. Put simply, as Donald Trump’s poll numbers continue to fall – or more likely become more anchored in a position with him clearly behind – he is himself being lowered onto his own personal kryptonite: Loserdom.
One charge, one taunt, one attack will rile and unhinge Donald Trump more than any other. That he’s a loser. At the moment, the facts leave little question on this point.
In the Trumpian world of pure alpha dominance no failure or state of existence is more total, hopeless, unmanning or unbearable. He is now living there, in public, each day, for all to see, even helpfully enumerated on most days in new poll numbers. A brittle narcissistic ego, coddled for decades by armies of yes men and a generally fawning business and tabloid press, won’t hold up well under that kind of strain.
Losing is always hard. Few of us have ever been candidates for public office. But we all know this from our own lives. But it is uniquely hard for Trump’s campaign because the campaign’s entire premise is “winning” and on a slightly less literal level on what I’ve called dominance politics. Losing is hard for any campaign both emotionally for all involved but also because losing is demoralizing and can trigger a self-perpetuating cycle. But most campaign’s have issue agendas, goals that provide an emotional and aspirational ballast to the effort. You may be losing but that doesn’t invalidate what you believe or the substance of your proposed policies. That’s not true for Trump because “winning” isn’t just the goal it’s the raison d’etre and premise of the whole effort. A candidacy based on “winning” which is in fact losing and perhaps losing badly isn’t just on the ropes; it begins to look ridiculous.
The Democratic primary wasn’t rigged — despite the best efforts of Bernie Sanders’s staffers in Nevada. On Monday, CBS News published a postmortem on the Vermont senator’s campaign, which includes this anecdote about how Sanders’s Silver State director Joan Kato prepared her team for caucus day:
At one point shortly before the caucuses, she instructed staff to buy double-sided coins — in case coin-flips were needed to decide any of the caucuses in the event of a tie, according to staffers.
All that yelling about Hillary being “corrupt” was just projection.
And how are things going for Hillary? Great! Here’s Ruby Cramer on Clinton’s joint appearance with Elizabeth Warren in Cincinnati yesterday: Elizabeth Warren Finally Opens Her Arms To Hillary Clinton. Cramer notes that two years ago when these two famous women campaigned on the same stage in Massachusetts for then candidate for Governor Martha Coakley, Warren “barely mentioned Clinton.” But now it’s different between them.
Two years later, the 2016 election has forged a vastly different Clinton–Warren alliance.
Here on Monday, beneath the painted dome of the Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal, they emerged for their first joint appearance, unveiling a powerful new partnership aimed at Donald Trump, with none of the old distance and unease.
The pair arrived together, Clinton leading the way onto a circular platform in the middle of the hall. Around the stage, 2,600 crowded into the historic atrium. Warren threw out both hands, palms to the ceiling, as if in awe of the scene around her.
Clinton motioned Warren toward the podium, then stood near the back of the stage and took a breath. “Woo!” she mouthed. Over the sound of the crowd, Warren leaned into the microphone with the same surprised look: “Whoa!” she said. Thank you!”
“I’m here today because I’m with her. Yes, her!”
Later, as Clinton spoke, Warren stood to the side and listened intently, reacting to each line along with the voters below. To a mention of infrastructure investment, Warren nodded fiercely and let out a “yes!” To a promise of student loan relief, she jumped up and down on her toes. To a dig at corporations, she pumped her fist in the air. And when the candidate led the crowd into one of her favorite lines — about playing the “woman’s card” — Warren chanted along on cue: “Deal me in!”
More than most of the campaign’s surrogates on the trail, Warren took the stage for Clinton with a distinct mission, taking a high-energy and unapologetic approach to the job of attack dog, with a speech that complemented Clinton’s, not simply introduced it.
Well you probably saw the speech–if you didn’t please be sure to watch it. And read much more about it at the Buzzfeed link.
Bernie Sanders could have done what Warren has done. He probably could have been another good attack dog against Trump. But he chose a different path, and now it’s too late. I really hope he doesn’t campaign for Hillary, and I couldn’t care less if he endorses her. His followers have mostly jumped on her bandwagon, and those who are still wallowing in self-pity won’t be needed. I dread the thought of Bernie campaigning at this point, because I’m convinced he would only find underhanded ways to damage her. I just hope he continues to fade from public view.
What stories are you following today? Please share your thoughts and links in the comment thread and have a terrific Tuesday!
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
I’m feeling particularly lazy today–mostly I just don’t want to read any news. I’d rather be reading a novel, a true crime book, or maybe a biography. But I’ve been forcing myself to surf around to see what’s going on, and here’s what I’ve come up with.
The primaries are over, but Bernie Sanders is still hanging around like party guest who won’t leave even after everyone else has gone home and the party-givers have done the dishes and are dying to get some sleep.
Bernie Sanders is going to delay getting into the fight against Donald Trump so that he can get a few good ideas, a few iffy ideas, and a few bad ideas into the Democratic Party platform, a document that is about as useful as a roll of Charmin, but considerably less soothing to the skin. Just for good measure, he wants to get rid of Superdelegates and open up the primaries, which will work out great for Bernie Sanders from a year ago, but which will suck the first time Democrats have to run a primary against an incumbent Republican president, and Republican voters decide to vote in Democratic primaries just to mess with us. Brilliant, but none of which required him to continue to slight Hillary Clinton, except he might make Susan Sarandon and her purse dog mad.
Those Lazy Days of Summer, Jan Matson
Instead, Bernie will wait until he’s good and ready to make a half-assed endorsement of Hillary Clinton that will succeed only in winning a news cycle or two for Donald Trump, as he and the media rehash every attack he’s made against her, and every painstaking yank of the pliers it took to extract said half-assed endorsement.
But there’s something even more revealing about Bernie’s speech to supporters, because wrapped around those relevant 107 seconds was about 22 other minutes of Bernie boilerplate that neatly laid out his priorities. Throughout this campaign, Bernie and his supporters have continually insisted that if black voters would only stop and listen and give him a chance, they’d be dazzled by his down-ness and abandon their habitual support for Hillary….
Black people got tacked onto a few lists of other things, and some lines about failing schools and criminal justice reform. Or to put it another way, what black voters could expect from a Rand Paul speech. Not a syllable about ending police brutality or racial profiling, nothing about the Voting Rights Act or any other Republican schemes to disenfranchise black voters, and those are just the easy ones. Fifty-six seconds out of 23 minutes, and none of the bullet points he rushed up onto his website when #BlackLivesMatter protesters hassled him almost a year ago. Yeah, black voters had Bernie all wrong, didn’t they?
Watch Sanders’ almost-nonexistent thoughts on the Black vote at Mediaite.
As you can probably guess, most Democratic Party insiders were really hoping Bernie Sanders would formally drop out of the race this week and offer Hillary Clinton a fulsome endorsement. But they also recognize that he’s stopped attacking her, is promising to work against Donald Trump, and has basically accepted that the race is over — so if he wants to fade away slowly, they are happy to live with that.
The aspect of Sanders’s speech that really set them off last night was something entirely different. Not the fact that Sanders said he wanted his supporters to continue to influence the direction of the party but the specific way he characterized this direction:
I also look forward to working with Secretary Clinton to transform the Democratic Party so that it becomes a party of working people and young people, and not just wealthy campaign contributors: a party that has the courage to take on Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, the fossil fuel industry and the other powerful special interests that dominate our political and economic life.
It’s incredibly frustrating for people who’ve been working in mainstream Democratic Party politics to hear their party described as something other than a party for “working people.” Clinton won the votes of millions of working-class Americans, primarily people of color, throughout the 2016 primaries; and in the 2012, 2008, 2004, and 2000 election cycles there’s been a pronounced tendency for lower-income voters to back the Democratic candidate and higher-income ones to back the Republican.
Similarly, it comes as a shock to people who participated in the passage of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill (or the White House’s series of later anti-bank regulatory actions) or who’ve worked to uphold the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plant rule that they apparently lack the courage to stand up to Wall Street and fossil fuel interests.
It’s one thing to disagree with people about policy substance or political tactics. But something Sanders has done throughout his campaign and very pointedly did here is straightforwardly challenge the good faith of the vast majority of his colleagues in Democratic Party politics. It’s worked pretty well for him on the stump, but it doesn’t win you a lot of friends. And to be honest, it’s simply wrong — you can raise a lot of objections to Obama’s approach to Wall Street or climate change, but the fact is that the financial services industry and the fossil fuel industries have been fighting him every step of the way.
Barney Frank was right. Bernie Sanders alienates his natural allies, whether deliberately or because he’s simply a terrible politician.
on Thursday, the Vermont senator announced he had an announcement to make. It’s been a long campaign, and Hillary Clinton bested him on every conceivable metric—albeit narrowly in some—other than the party-liquefying convention nuclear option to which Sanders doesn’t have the codes anyway. So, on Thursday night, the Vermont senator gathered friends, loved ones, and supporters around the country to huddle around a live video feed to humbly announce: He’s still running for president.
To be fair, Sanders hinted that soon he will be done and his “role” will change in a “very short period of time,” but he notably stopped well short of even remotely ending his campaign or endorsing Hillary Clinton.
Frankly, I doubt if he’ll ever endorse her, and I just don’t care. I don’t want him to campaign for her; I just want him to disappear.
Even with his path to the Democratic presidential nomination rapidly disappearing, Bernie Sanders couldn’t bring himself to publicly accept defeat. Along the way, he overplayed his hand and squandered the political capital he’ll need to force policy and procedural reforms on the Democratic Party, according to allies and party strategists.
“We’re already way past the maximum point of leverage that he and his movement built up. It’s definitely dissipating every day,” said Joe Trippi, a Democratic strategist and veteran of presidential campaigns.
Trippi put the high point of Sanders’ clout at April 9, after he won seven straight contests ending with Wyoming. But he lost seven of the last nine contests, walloped by 58 points in the District of Columbia, which held the final primary of the season on Tuesday. Hillary Clinton already had locked up the nomination with a decisive victory in California a week earlier, and some of the highest-profile Sanders supporters—including Senator Jeff Merkley, Representative Raul Grijalva, and the liberal activist group MoveOn—are now lining up behind her.
Read the rest at the link.
While Bernie continues to wallow in sour grapes, Hillary Clinton has been very busy defining Donald Trump for the folks who are just beginning to pay attention.
Lazy Summer, Mitch Caster
FirstPost.com: Hillary Clinton brings out ads to give Donald Trump “rude awakening.”
Hillary Clinton and her Democratic allies have invested at least $41 million in commercials in crucial states such as Ohio, Florida and Nevada over the next six weeks, a series of summer broadsides against her Republican opponent. Those messages will be echoed by hundreds of Clinton workers in those same states and amplified by President Barack Obama and other top Democrats.
Trump has made few preparations for contending with that sort of well-oiled political machine. His campaign has no advertising plans and is just now hiring employees in important states. Republican leaders are far from agreement on how best to talk to voters about the polarising billionaire, or if they will at all. And Trump is running out of time: Early voting starts in Iowa in just three and a half months.
“It’s political malpractice,” said Mitch Stewart, Obama’s 2012 battleground states director and a Clinton backer. “He’s in for a rude awakening. This isn’t a national vote contest where you can be on cable news every day and dominate coverage. This is literally going state by state and coming up with a plan in each.”
Clinton’s large June and July ad buy comes as a reward for her near-constant fundraising. In May, she raised $27 million in primary election money that must be used before she accepts her party’s nomination at the convention in late July.
Trump is playing catch up. He did not begin raising money in earnest until 25 May, having largely financed his primary bid through personal loans to his campaign.
Clinton’s latest spots, highlighting her past advocacy for children, are an attempt to reintroduce the returning presidential candidate — she lost the 2008 Democratic primary to Obama — to general election voters. Her campaign is spending about $23 million on ads by the convention, according to advertising tracker Kantar Media’s CMAG.
But those voters are also hearing from Priorities USA, a super political action committee financed by millions of dollars from Clinton’s staunchest supporters. The goal of those that $18.7 million batch of ads: cast Trump as a con-man and bully unprepared to be commander in chief.
Key West, Thomas Kinkade
As I wrote on Thursday, it’s beginning to look like Trump isn’t making even a halfhearted attempt to run for president. He seems to be focusing on deep red and deep blue states and ignoring the swing states he would have to win in order to have any hope of beating Hillary. He spent yesterday in Texas.
His campaign roiled by infighting and Republican revolt, Donald Trump is working to address a battleground state staffing shortage that highlights his reliance on a skeptical GOP establishment.
The New York billionaire has slowly begun to add paid staff in a handful of swing states — Wisconsin and Iowa, among them — even as campaign officials concede the presumptive presidential nominee has little desire or capacity to construct the kind of massive national operation that has come to define modern-day White House campaigns. Trump plans instead to depend upon the national Republican Party to lead state-based efforts on his behalf, while Democrat Hillary Clinton has had an army of staff dedicated specifically to her campaign in general election battlegrounds for months.
“It would be disingenuous and wrongheaded to take a playbook that has been used over and over again,” said Trump senior aide Karen Giorno, in charge of an 11-state Southeastern bloc including battlegrounds Florida, North Carolina and Virginia. “We are creating the playbook.
The unconventional approach reflects Trump’s disdain for traditional Republican campaign practices and inclination to implement businesslike decision-making. It also carries substantial risk.If, for instance, Trump is lagging Clinton badly in polls come early fall, there is nothing to stop the RNC from cutting its losses and focusing instead on saving Republican control of the Senate or other competitive contests also on the ballot this November. Beth Myers, who managed 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s campaign, said White House candidates have unique needs that a broader-brush approach cannot always meet.
“We are creating the playbook.” Unbelievable.
What stories are you following today?
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
The presidential primary process is over. Voters in the District of Columbia will be the last to sound off, as Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton face off one last time in the battle for their party’s nomination.
With 29 percent of precincts reporting, Clinton was declared the winner by the Associated Press shortly after 8:45 pm EST, leading Sanders 78.8 percent to 21 percent.
DC offers up 20 pledged delegates, 13 of which are split among the four wards of the non-state’s two municipal districts. The overall winner receives all seven of the remaining pledged delegates. There are even more superdelegates, however, 26 in total, of which all but four have already aligned with Clinton
The primary’s rules favor Clinton, as only Democratic Party members are allowed to vote. In many of Sanders’ victorious showings, it was non-partisans voting in semi-open primaries that tipped the balance for the self-described Democratic socialist.
Up to this point, Clinton has won 33 primary contests and Sanders has been victorious in 23, in which Clinton has garnered a total of 2,203 pledged delegates to Sanders’ 1,828. In addition to those tallies, 581 superdelegates have committed to Clinton, while 49 have voiced support for Sanders.
The Democratic National Convention will take place from July 25 to 28 in Philadelphia.
Hillary Clinton will win the last contest of the Democratic primary season, according to a CNN projection, eclipsing Bernie Sanders in the little-noticed election in the District of Columbia.
The contest doesn’t change the general election match-up. Clinton clinched her nomination last week, but Sanders declined to drop out and pledged to give every voter a chance to decide between the two candidates.
Though the primary was essentially over, Sanders held a single campaign event in Washington last Thursday, and he reminded voters here about his support for statehood for the nation’s capital.
It’s a live blog and open thread!! Hillary is the one!
On Monday, the AP and NBC News separately announced that Hillary Clinton had the requisite number of pledged delegates and super delegates to be the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party–the first woman in history to accomplish this.
On Tuesday, Hillary won more than enough votes to hold a majority of pledged delegates and make it impossible for her opponent to do so. She won primaries in New Jersey, California, New Mexico, and South Dakota. Her opponent won only North Dakota and Montana.
Yesterday, President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and Senator Elizabeth Warren endorsed Hillary’s campaign for President and vowed to campaign hard for her. Next Wednesday, President Obama will appear with Hillary at an event in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Obama released his endorsement in a video.
No sitting U.S. president in recent history has campaigned for his party’s nominee as much as Barack Obama plans to for Hillary Clinton.
Mr. Obama endorsed the presumptive Democratic nominee on Thursday in a video posted on social media. Her campaign also announced plans for a joint appearance with the president next Wednesday in Green Bay, Wis., kicking off a marathon push to retain Democratic control of the White House.
“I’m fired up,” Mr. Obama said in the video, echoing a chant from his 2008 campaign.
The announcements came just 90 minutes after Mrs. Clinton’s primary opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders, emerged from a White House meeting with Mr. Obama, where the Vermont lawmaker gave his strongest signal yet that he wouldn’t try to block her nomination at the July convention in Philadelphia….
“It means something for him to say she is everything she says she will be, because he was a doubter,” said Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, noting that Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton were not natural allies.
Mark Mellman, a Democratic polling expert, said that for Mr. Obama, the potential reward is greater than any risk. “The peril for any president is you get too involved and lose and have it tarnish your legacy,” he said. But if Mr. Obama stayed idle and Mrs. Clinton lost, he would take a hit anyway, Mr. Mellman added, and the president’s policy would be at risk, too.
Mr. Trump said last week that Mr. Obama shouldn’t get involved in the race, warning that “if he campaigns, that means I’m allowed to hit him.”
Go ahead and try, Donald.
Vice President Joe Biden and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren quickly threw their public support behind Mrs. Clinton after Mr. Obama’s endorsement. Mr. Biden, in an off-the-cuff comment during a speech Thursday night, said “God willing” the next president will be Mrs. Clinton.
Michelle Obama also said she will campaign for Hillary.
“I’m ready,” Warren said in an interview with The Globe. “I’m ready to jump in this fight and make sure that Hillary Clinton is the next president of the United States and be sure that Donald Trump gets nowhere near the White House.”
She added: “I’m supporting Hillary Clinton because she’s a fighter, a fighter with guts.” ….
Warren, a champion of the left who passed up a presidential bid of her own, despite the urging of legions of followers, is uniquely positioned to serve as a bridge between the establishment candidacy of Clinton and Sanders supporters, who are being forced to come to terms with the Vermont senator’s loss.
Democrats view the freshman Massachusetts senator as a path of sorts to party unity, which helps explain an upsurge in buzz about Warren as a potential vice presidential pick. Senators and top staff say talking up Warren for vice president is a way to show Sanders and his millions of followers that the party establishment heard them loud and clear.
Warren appeared on the Rachel Maddow show last night to endorse Hillary. Watch or rewatch that appearance at the link.
Last night, Joe Biden warned of the danger of Donald Trump’s attacks on the federal judge who is hearing a case against Trump “university.”
Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton will meet privately Friday morning, according to two knowledgeable Democrats.
The sit-down, coming just hours after the Massachusetts senator formally endorsed the presumptive Democratic nominee, will fuel speculation about her prospects as a potential vice presidential pick.
The women have had several conversations over the past month, including one that lasted around half an hour, sources told The Washington Post. The conversations were broad and focused on large topics and issues, rather than the nitty-gritty of the campaign. Their staffs have been engaged in more tactical discussions.
The two women do not have a particularly deep relationship, but that could change as Clinton rallies Democrats around her in the wake of winning the Democratic nomination in recent days. There were three big endorsements that could have meaningfully helped Clinton wrap up the nomination battle: Warren, President Obama and Vice President Biden. Clinton secured all three on Thursday.
Clinton, a Yale-educated lawyer, like Warren, a Harvard Law professor until she was elected in 2012, is a policy wonk at heart. So the two might talk in more detail about how Clinton could embrace pieces of the progressive agenda that allowed Bernie Sanders to win more than 20 states.
Or maybe she could help educate Sanders’ supporters about Hillary’s already very progressive policy proposals and explain that her plan to take on Wall Street is quite a bit stronger than Sanders’ vague ideas about “breaking up the banks.”
Let’s hope we’re close to seeing the back of Bernie Sanders. He held a rally in Washington DC last night, and he plans to compete in the DC primary on Jun 14. I hope by then Democratic leaders will have convinced him to stand down and go back to Vermont. I honestly don’t see how he can campaign for Hillary after he has so poisoned his supporters against her, but maybe I’m wrong. We’ll see.
Shortly after Sanders emerged from his meeting with Obama, word got out that the president was going to trumpet an endorsement of his former secretary of state in a video. And then it became clear that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a darling of the political left and Sanders’s ideological soulmate, had also chosen Thursday to throw her support behind Clinton.
The theme of the day soon became Democratic unity, drowning out the conversation about what policy changes and other concessions Sanders might exact in exchange for exiting the race….
By the time Sanders arrived on Capitol Hill for a series of afternoon meetings, Clinton’s campaign had released the video of Obama endorsing her, in which he says of Clinton’s pursuit of the presidency : “I don’t think there’s ever been someone so qualified to hold this office.”
After arriving on the Hill, Sanders headed to the suite of Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.).
Sitting on a chair across from Reid by a bookshelf, the Democratic presidential hopeful sat silently as reporters asked him about the six states that voted on Tuesday. Sanders had posted victories in only two.
“Okay you guys, we’re not going to take any questions,” Reid said as Sanders stared straight ahead with his hands on his knees. “That’s kind of the deal that I made.”
The walls are crumbling, and Bernie Sanders knows it.
Barack Obama made his support for Hillary Clinton official on Thursday. So did Vice President Joe Biden and liberal hero Sen. Elizabeth Warren. The major political groups surrounding Sanders are saying it’s time to unify.
The campaign is rapidly winding down around Sanders, the Senate gadfly-turned-unlikely revolutionary who outperformed everyone’s expectations, and he finally began to acknowledge it Thursday.
“We need real change in this country. And what people also understand is that no president, not Bernie Sanders, not anybody else, can do it alone,” he told roughly 3,000 supporters gathered near Washington’s RFK stadium on a hot evening, returning to his original stump speech about billionaires, the “corrupt campaign finance system,” and “the broken criminal justice system” without once mentioning Clinton or the Democratic Party’s convention….
The signals that he now accepts the fact that he won’t be the party’s nominee were unmistakable.
The courtship letters his campaign had planned to send superdelegates have been put on hold. His go-to argument — that he polls better against Donald Trump than Clinton — has been scrubbed from his public statements. There are mass staff departures, and his digital firm set up a new site to help laid off staffers find their next gig.
Even his Senate relationship rebuilding effort has begun.
It’s a swift denouement for a campaign that had been bleeding money and staff for weeks, hastened by the surprising margin of Sanders’ loss in California on Tuesday night — which his aides hadn’t anticipated partly because they stopped polling in California days earlier due to the cost.
I really hope Sanders can keep his exit dignified.
On Friday, just three days after securing the Democratic nomination, Clinton launched a new “millennial engagement” program, targeting voters under the age of 35 with three new hires — including one from the Bernie Sanders campaign.
The new team comes together after a long-fought primary against Sanders, the Vermont senator whose campaign was able to peel away students and twenty-somethings in large numbers. Clinton aides, now preparing for a general election against Donald Trump, view young people as a crucial piece of the electorate, building on an existing coalition of women, older voters, and people of color.
The program expands on the Clinton’s campus outreach effort, an endeavor that largely failed in primary states against Sanders. Campaign operatives now hope to widen their reach to voters under the age of 30, while keeping a focus on winning back college-age voters.
Kunoor Ojha, a former Sanders aide set to join the millennial engagement program, is the first member of the senator’s staff to join the Clinton campaign, an aide said.
The campaign plans to send the youth outreach team around the country to “listen directly to millennial voters,” according to a Clinton official. The team of three operatives will also work directly with staffers in battleground states to create local outreach programs and hold “working group” meetings with voters under 35.
Read more details at the link.
What else is happening? Please post your thoughts and links in the comment thread and have a fabulous weekend!
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
There are a few things I really need to rant about today and all of it has to do with the fact that some people just can’t see past privilege and recognize when they’re behaving liked spoiled asses. Well, it’s mostly white people and mostly men, and mostly Christians and mostly straight people, but there’s enough of them and they’ve got the power and the anger to ruin the lives of a whole bunch of people. I am really trying to be gracious to the people who got caught up in the Bernie scam. Sheesh, people, where are your critical thinking skills?
I’ve been watching one thread that started out as a complaint about the possible price tag of an Armani jacket degrade into Hillary took a private jet plane to her speech in NYC. I also had to endure some white dude who hasn’t got enough money explain to me that he has no privilege so take it up with the folks with money. Dude, money is just one aspect where you can achieve favoritism by society. Do some research! Develop some empathy. Oh wait, you’ve listened to Bernie who thinks only your net worth matters as a measure of your integrity.
Much of the criticism of Sanders’s foreign policy stances have come from his left flank. The World Socialist Web Site called Sanders a “silent partner of American militarism.” And Counterpunch, a left-wing magazine, has criticized Sanders on more than one occasion for being insufficiently pacifist.
“He behaves more like a technofascist disguised as a liberal, who backs all of President Obama’s nasty little wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen,” wrote Thomas Naylor in the magazine. “Since he always ‘supports the troops,’ Sanders never opposes any defense spending bill. He stands behind all military contractors who bring much-needed jobs to Vermont.”
Sanders’s support of the Kosovo War led to the resignation of an adviser; when antiwar activists occupied his office, he had them arrested; and Sanders voted to authorize the war in Afghanistan, Howard Lisnoff wrote in the same publication.
[R]eaders ought not to count on him to push back on the militarism and military actions that have become routine under both Democrats and Republicans who occupy the presidency,” Lisnoff added.
The double standards for women and the bull shit people will buy about Hillary is just one set of the things that we knew we’d face this election because the folks who seem like rational liberal democrats suddenly start sounding like they spend time reading every conspiracy possible from InfoWars when it comes to Hillary Clinton. We’ve seen the AP set up emergency lines for Reporters getting threats from Bernie Sanders. Super Delegates have been receiving similar threats and many are being investigated by law enforcement. Every time some one posts for Hillary some really nasty, caps using creep threatens violence and all kinds of things.
Even as some top supporters have started backing down since Tuesday night, when Hillary Clinton claimed the Democratic nomination — and as a planned Sanders letter to superdelegates campaigning for them to support him rather than Clinton appears in limbo — frustration is bubbling among those who want the senator to keep the campaign going.
In their view, the president is trying to prematurely end the fight. They warn that it won’t work and that the blowback might show him he’s not as popular with the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party as he might like to think.
“The president is not Sen. Sanders’ boss. We’ve got to get this straight here,” said Nina Turner, a former Ohio state senator who’s been traveling the country on behalf of the campaign. “There’s respect that’s for the commander in chief … but Sen. Sanders is duly elected, and he’ll make his own decisions.”
Or else.
“In some ways, even though [the president’s] numbers are good, and good with the Democratic base, he overestimates,” said a Democratic strategist aligned with Sanders. “Much of the activist Bernie movement — I think he overestimates his strength with those people.”
The campaign is hypersensitive to any whiff of being treated as a smaller, protest candidacy, to failures to acknowledge that Sanders won more than 40 percent of the primary vote, or to being dismissed by what they see as the Democratic establishment. And an endorsement of Hillary Clinton by a president who many Sanders supporters believe fell short of his progressive promise has that establishment smell.
“They don’t want to see him shoved to the side,” the Democratic strategist said. “A lot of love is going to be more productive than a lot of pressure. There’s a strain out there that just wants to hit [Sanders] with a 2-by-4 and say, ‘get out.’ The better course is to show appreciation and engagement and show how much the party needs this guy.”
Sanders has never been much interested in what Democratic leaders have had to say about his presidential bid, and every call along the way for him to drop out seems only to have encouraged him to push ahead. That’s left prominent Clinton supporters worried about what the reaction to Obama’s urging will be.
“People talk to Bernie. But Bernie marches to his own drum. And that’s true if Clinton talks to him or if Obama talks to him,” said Clinton ally and former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell. “The president deserves an A for effort, but I’m not sure he’s going to have much of an impact.”
I’ve noticed how many of us are in “secret” and “closed” Hillary Facebook Groups. We have to in order to post our true feelings over there for many reasons not least among them are the tons of angry Bernie Trolls that just dump right wing memes straight out of InfoWars on any thread.
Writer and comedian Joanna Castle Miller wrote a Facebook post that is going viral on Twitter (she took a screenshot of the original). Miller has a lot of insight into the campaign—even though she’s a liberal, her father is Darrell Castle, the real, live third party candidate of the right-wing Constitution Party. Traveling around the country and meeting voters and supporters of all kinds, she noted something unique about Hillary supporters. It maybe explains why you see (and hear) Sanders & Trump supporters all over the Internet but only saw Hillary supporters in vote tallies. Here’s the solution to the mystery of the missing Hillary fans.
Over the last week, I spent time with all of the 3 major campaigns here in CA as part of the show I’ve been working on. Everyone I met was polite, energized, and passionate. But I noticed one big difference between Hillary’s supporters and everyone else.
When I spoke with Trump and Bernie supporters, they were most eager to get in front of the camera. They spoke with a lot of confidence, and they spoke very freely.
Almost all of Hillary’s volunteers (approx the same number as were at Bernie’s office on the same day) were women, of varying age and race. Her supporters did *not* clamor for the camera. It was the opposite. They wanted to be interviewed, but they debate it for what seemed like forever. They got quiet and asked questions like, “Will my name be used?” “Where will this be seen?” and “Can I wear sunglasses?” Some of them thanked me and said no, and they looked really sad about it. When I pressed them, they told me they were terrified of the online threats they might receive, and in some cases had already received. Even lead organizers admitted they hadn’t put up a yard sign or bumper sticker for fear of retaliation. When women walked in to volunteer for the phone bank, they were assured they wouldn’t have to give their names if they were too afraid.
Hillary’s office was tucked away in a dying mall, with little hand-drawn posters taped up, cheerleader-style. It was cheery, but quiet and nearly invisible. A lot like those volunteers.
This is not to generalize all women as Hillary supporters or as timid – of course not! But I personally believe there’s a correlation between her largely female volunteer base (as of now), her unexpected voter turnout, and the fear so many women have expressing themselves online, or on the street, or in the board room.
A lot of people on social media have wondered where all of Hillary’s votes came from, because there was no signage no outpouring of love on Facebook. It shouldn’t surprise us that when we fail to listen to women’s voices well in the public sphere, we mis-calculate what women are actually thinking and doing in private. We didn’t know where Hillary’s votes were coming from because they didn’t feel it was safe for them to tell us in the first place.
So, there you go: they were there, a lot of them were women, and they didn’t trust the general public not to act like general a-holes if they spoke up.
During a Republican district convention in the suburban Twin Cities last month, Ali Jimenez-Hopper helped seal her endorsement as a state House candidate with a speech that attacked her Democratic opponent on the basis of her sexual orientation and race.
Referring to Erin Maye Quade, a staffer for Keith Ellison who has a black dad and is married to a woman, Jimenez-Hopper said “she is really far left [in] her values.”
“She brings up that she is half black and she uses that as a strength. She brings up that she is in support of LGBT and that lifestyle and puts out pictures on Twitter of her and her wife,” Jimenez-Hopper continued. “I believe in the traditional marriage in the sense that it’s between a husband and wife and God and that family is important. We need to have these values so we can go forth and think about your community.”
Following that speech, Jimenez-Hopper was officially endorsed as the GOP candidate for the House seat being vacated by Republican Rep. Tara Mack. Neither Jimenez-Hopper or Maye Quade face primary challengers, meaning they’re set to face off in the general election this November
Reached for comment, Maye Quade said that like many people, she first heard audio of Jimenez-Hopper’s remarks when they were detailed in a thecolu.mn report published Wednesday. She said she came across the article this morning while in bed with her wife Alyse.
“This isn’t a Republican or Democrat thing, it’s basic human respect and it’s shocking to hear from anyone,” Maye Quade told ThinkProgress, adding that she’s never met Jimenez-Hopper. “That’s not the tone I want for this election — at least for me.”
Maye Quade, a longtime community organizer and Apple Valley resident, said she’s completely unaccustomed to experiencing racism or homophobia in her suburban community. As news of Jimenez-Hopper’s remarks circulated, Maye Quade said she’s experienced an “outpouring of love” from people on both sides of the aisle.
Despite the fact that the seat Maye Quade is running for is currently held by a Republican, she pointed out that the “purple” district was carried by Barack Obama in 2012 and Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton two years later. She said she intends for her campaign to be focused on issues like ameliorating childhood hunger, investing in transportation, enacting statewide paid family leave, and providing people with better mental health resources.
“We can’t afford to focus on dividing people and spewing hate,” she said.
Dividing people and spewing hate–especially towards women and minorities of all flavors–is the tagline of the 2016 elections.
Bernie Sanders on Thursday emerged from a White House meeting with President Barack Obama and vowed to work together with Hillary Clinton to defeat Donald Trump in November.
Warning that Trump would make a “disaster” leader of the country, the Vermont senator — who has pledged to continue his White House bid even after Clinton became the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee — said he would “work as hard as I can to make sure that Donald Trump does not become president of the Untied States.”
“I look forward to meeting with (Clinton) in the near future to see how we can work together to defeat Donald Trump and to create a government which represents all of us and not just the 1 percent,” Sanders said.
The senator thanked both Obama and Vice President Joe Biden for showing “impartiality” during the course of the Democratic campaign.
“They said in the beginning is that they would not put their thumb on the scales and they kept their word and I appreciate that very, very much,” Sanders said.
He added that he will monitor a “full counting of the votes” in California, where Clinton won the Democratic primary contest on Tuesday. The results will show “a much closer vote,” Sanders predicted.
Sanders’ high-profile meeting with Obama and his public remarks after come just days after Sanders declared that he intends to continue his White House campaign. At a campaign rally Tuesday night, Sanders had declined to acknowledge that Clinton had secured the necessary delegates to win her party’s nomination. At the tail end of the primary season, Sanders had vowed to forge ahead to the District of Columbia’s primary next week, and then on to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.
You can see the presser at the CNN link above.
We shall see Bernie. We shall see. As my Irish Grandmother used to say, “the proof is in the pudding”.
Other Female Firsts Covered Like Hillary’s Historic Nomination
Hillary Clinton has made history by becoming the first female presumptive presidential nominee of a major U.S. party. In doing so, she joins a long line of celebrated female firsts…
MAY 20, 1932
DERRY, Northern Ireland — “Amelia Earhart completed her solo non-stop flight across the Atlantic yesterday afternoon. Her landing was met with skepticism by aviation enthusiasts who claimed her aircraft gave her an ‘unfair advantage.’”
SEPT 20, 1973
HOUSTON, Texas — “Billie Jean King has crushed her male opponent Bobby Riggs in a highly anticipated tennis match. This raises the question: do the rules of tennis need to be changed?”
DEC, 1903
OSLO, Norway — “Ignoring voice vote, rigged Nobel Prize committee hands award to Marie Curie.”
There are more of them and they are very very funny.
My headline today includes the beginning of a quote from one of my local sheroes Chef Leah Chase. She’s called the Queen of Creole Cuisine and had to fight to be taken seriously as a chef. She owns a very successful restaurant here and has achieved many prestigious awards. You have no idea how significant this is for a Black American woman to hold so many accolades. She was born in 1923 which is exactly the year my parents were born. You can read the full quote on the painted power box picture.
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.
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Recent Comments