March 8, 2016

Sanders files suit against Ohio secretary of state in push to allow 17-year-olds to vote

Sanders files suit against Ohio secretary of state in push to allow 17-year-olds to vote

Bernie Sanders said Tuesday his campaign has filed suit against Ohio's secretary of state, seeking to allow 17-year-olds to vote in the presidential primary there.

Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver argued Tuesday that state law previously allowed 17-year-olds to vote in presidential primaries, accusing Jon Husted, a Republican, of trying to "disenfranchise" voters.

"The secretary of state has decided to disenfranchise people who are 17 but will be 18 by the day of the general election. Those people have been allowed to vote under the law of Ohio, but the secretary of state of the state of Ohio has decided to disenfranchise those people to forbid them from voting in the primary that is coming up on March 15," Weaver told reporters in Detroit.

The Columbus Dispatch reported Saturday that a state Democratic lawmaker raised the issue last week, claiming that Husted changed the interpretation of the law.

But Husted said Tuesday that there has been no change -- 17-year-olds who turn 18 by Election Day in November have always been allowed to vote in direct nominations (such as Ohio's Senate primary) but barred from voting for delegates in the presidential primary.

Not sure I understand why they let them vote for some things but not for others if they are going to be 18 by November.

March 8, 2016

Sample ballot pic from Chicago Cook County Dems twitter page. No Bernie.

I was just reading this stunning post about how that county sent out sample ballots without Bernie's name on it. Their response when asked why was that they endorsed Hillary.

So because they endorsed Hillary they left Bernie off the sample ballot.

Here is their twitter page:

https://twitter.com/cookcodems

Here is their image there of their sample ballot. Some are saying it's simply a flyer with their endorsements. If it is just a flyer then it should NOT say "Sample Ballot" at the top.



Proud enough of their unbelievable action to post it to their twitter page.

March 7, 2016

Clinton’s Claims on Auto Industry ‘Not True’....Bernie speaks out.

Clinton’s Claims on Auto Industry ‘Not True’

What Hillary did last night was shameful. What those who refuse to listen to the real truth are doing is equally shameful.

When you care more about winning than telling the truth you hurt our country.

Clinton, who has struggled to downplay her support for job-killing trade deals, used a Sunday night debate in Flint, Michigan, to disingenuously mischaracterize Sanders record on the auto industry. In fact, Sanders voted for the carmaker bailout. He supported a $14 billion aid package which passed the House on Dec. 10, 2008. When that bill ran into a Senate Republican roadblock, the White House turned to a separate Wall Street bailout fund for loans to the auto industry.

In an interview on Monday with WOOD-TV, Sanders called Clinton’s claim “not true” and said it was part of a “disingenuous” attempt to deflect attention from her trade record. “It is absolutely untrue to say I voted against helping the automobile industry and workers,” Sanders told the Grand Rapids, Michigan, television station.

During a rally at a hockey rink here in Kalamazoo, Sanders also spoke to more than 3,200 supporters about Clinton’s record on trade and his support for workers in the auto industry. “She has supported virtually every one of these disastrous trade agreements which have wreaked havoc,” Sanders told the rally. The North American Free Trade Agreement and other business-backed trade deals contributed to the loss of more than 230,000 manufacturing jobs in Michigan since 1994.

To deflect attention from her own record, Sanders said, Clinton “went out of her way to mischaracterize” his record of support for auto workers. “There was one vote in the United States Senate to support the automobile industry and, of course, I voted for it. To say otherwise is simply not telling the truth,” he said. “I understand that Secretary Clinton wants to deflect attention away from her record supporting trade agreements like NAFTA and normal trade relations with China but she shouldn’t do that by mischaracterizing my record. What I did not vote for is the bailout of the crooks on Wall Street whose illegal behavior and greed brought this economy into the worst downturn since the 1930s.”

March 7, 2016

VT Public Radio, Dec, 2008. Bernie and Leahy support auto bailout.

They speak against the financial industry bailout but support the bailing out of the auto industry.

Leahy, Sanders reluctantly support auto industry rescue

12/11/08 5:50PM By Bob Kinzel
(Host) Vermont's two U.S. Senators, Patrick Leahy and Bernie Sanders, say they're reluctantly supporting a $15 billion rescue package for the nation's auto industry.

Both senators say that allowing Ford, General Motors or Chrylser to fall into bankruptcy could affect a lot of auto related jobs in Vermont.

Senator Patrick Leahy says he's reluctantly supporting the bill because millions of jobs could be lost if the car companies go under:

(Leahy) "You can't have the most powerful nation on earth you can't have the automobile industry go belly up to some extent there's a national security component of the automobile industry...I look at the millions of jobs throughout America including a whole lot in Vermont connected to the automobile industry manufacturing type jobs and on top of that you have all of the dealers."

Senator Bernie Sanders voted against the $700 billion bail out of the financial services industry but he says this package is different:

(Sanders) "The problem is if you don't act in the midst of a growing recession what does it mean to create a situation where millions of more people become unemployed and that could spread and I have serious concerns about that I think it would be a terrible idea to add millions more to the unemployment rolls."

March 6, 2016

Did you see Jane Sanders on CNN a day or so ago.

She doesn't sound like a politician or a politician's wife. She speaks the truth that many wish she probably wouldn't have spoken. That's a genuine person for you...not politically polished.

BUT:

Did you hear what she said about Russell Simmons after he endorsed Hillary and attacked Bernie?

It's quite surprising. He had called Bernie first to discuss an endorsement. Bernie had trouble about pushing people not to eat their bacon and pork so it did not work out. Simmons is vegan, which is fine.

Some say she should not have said it, but the interviewer pointedly asked her about it. I think it is the kind of honesty our party has been missing.

I appreciate because I tend to be outspoken as well.

March 5, 2016

To those who haven't yet voted...don't worry your little heads. 538's got this.

From Harry Enten at Fivethirtyeight March 2.

Hillary Clinton’s Got This

To borrow a phrase from Dan Rather, Hillary Clinton swept through the South like a big wheel through a Delta cotton field on Super Tuesday. She won seven states total, including Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia in the South. She also won Massachusetts and American Samoa. Bernie Sanders emerged victorious in four states (Colorado, Minnesota, Oklahoma and Vermont), but his victories tended to come by smaller margins and in smaller states. The end result is that Clinton has a clear path to winning the nomination, and Sanders’s only hope to derail her is for something very unusual to happen.

....This lead is pretty much insurmountable. Democrats award delegates proportionally, which means Sanders would need to win by big margins in the remaining states to catch up. He hasn’t seen those kinds of wins outside of his home state of Vermont and next-door New Hampshire. Consider the case of Massachusetts: My colleague Nate Silver’s model had Sanders winning the state by 11 percentage points if the race were tied nationally and by 3 points based on the FiveThirtyEight polling average last week. Instead, Sanders lost by nearly 2 percentage points.

....Sanders, perhaps not surprisingly, has indicated that he’ll continue to fight for votes across the country. But for every win he may get in mostly white states, Clinton will be marching toward the nomination with likely victories in states such as Michigan and Florida. The math indicates that Clinton eventually will win the nomination with relative ease.

To paraphrase...Hillary will be the nominee but Bernie's welcome to be along for the ride.

This is shamelessly taking the human factor out of voting and pushing Hillary.

SO...to those of you in all these states yet to vote

...including the delegate rich state of California:

Too bad for you guys, but go ahead anyway. Just remember who's already won.

Idaho March 22nd

Arizona March 22nd

Alaska March 26th

Hawaii March 26th

Washington March 26th

Wisconsin April 5th

Wyoming April 9th

New York April 19th

Connecticut April 26th

Delaware April 26th

Maryland April 26th

Pennsylvania April 26th

Rhode Island April 26th

Indiana May 3rd

Nebraska May 10th

West Virginia May 10th

Kentucky May 17th

Oregon May 17th

California June 7th

Montana June 7th

New Jersey June 7th

New Mexico June 7th

North Dakota June 7th

South Dakota June 7th

District of Columbia June 14th

March 5, 2016

Primaries after March 15. Lots of them. Diary from Daily Kos.

Do the Democratic Primaries conclude on March 15th? No they conclude on June 14th

Just a list of the primaries after the date of transition to general election mode at Daily Kos.

Idaho March 22nd

Alaska March 26th

Hawaii March 26th

Washington March 26th

Wisconsin April 5th

Wyoming April 9th

New York April 19th

Connecticut April 26th

Delaware April 26th

Maryland April 26th

Pennsylvania April 26th

Rhode Island April 26th

Indiana May 3rd

Nebraska May 10th

West Virginia May 10th

Oregon May 17th

California June 7th

Montana June 7th

New Jersey June 7th

New Mexico June 7th

North Dakota June 7th

South Dakota June 7th

District of Columbia June 14th

March 5, 2016

Found on Twitter. Picture says it all.

March 4, 2016

The actual takeover from the 54th floor of the convention. It was quite real.

I posted some of this about a year ago.

Today I was reading that Howard Dean has declared his superdelegate vote will go to Hillary even if Bernie wins the popular vote. To heck with the wishes of the Vermont voters.

He has given his allegiance to a group of Democrats who held a press conference to say he would never be president. Go figure.

They were up high above the convention hall in 2000. Setting policy. A few men.

This is John Nichols' unforgettable column in the Progressive 2000. This is the archived version with all the dates above the article.

Behind the DLC Takeover

At the national convention of a major political party, an ideologically rigid sectarian clique secures the ultimate triumph. It inserts two of its own as nominees for the Presidency and the Vice Presidency. Heavily financed by the most powerful corporations in the world, the group's leaders gather in a private club fifty-four floors above the convention hall, apart from the delegates of the party they had infiltrated. There, they carefully monitor the convention's acceptance of a platform the organization had drafted almost in its entirety. Then, with the ticket secured and with the policy course of the party set, they introduce a team of 100 shock troops to deploy across the country to lock up the party's grassroots.

This is not some fantastic political thriller starring Harrison Ford or Sharon Stone. This is the real-life version of Invasion of the Party Snatchers--with the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) burrowing into the pod that is the Democratic Party.

Founded in the mid-1980s with essentially the same purpose as the Christian Coalition--to pull a broad political party dramatically to the right--the DLC has been far more successful than its headline-grabbing Republican counterpart. After Walter Mondale's 1984 defeat at the hands of Ronald Reagan, a group of mostly Southern, conservative Democrats hatched the theory that their party was in trouble because it had grown too sympathetic to the agendas of organized labor, feminists, African Americans, Latinos, gays and lesbians, peace activists, and egalitarians.

....A day is soon coming when "we'll finally be able to proclaim that all Democrats are, indeed, New Democrats," declared DLC President Al From on the eve of this year's Democratic National Convention.

They closed their doors in 2011 proclaiming that their purposes had been achieved. Some days it's hard to find argument with that.

I think the most disheartening thing this group ever did was to have a press conference in 2003 to declare that Howard Dean was not the man to be president.

What the DLC said about Dean in 2003

More than 50 centrist Democrats, including Virginia Gov. Mark R. Warner, met here yesterday to plot strategy for the "New Democrat" movement. To help get the ball rolling they read a memo by Al From and Bruce Reed, the chairman and president of the Democratic Leadership Council. The memo dismissed Dean as an elitist liberal from the "McGovern-Mondale wing" of the party -- "the wing that lost 49 states in two elections, and transformed Democrats from a strong national party into a much weaker regional one."

"It is a shame that the DLC is trying to divide the party along these lines," said Dean spokesman Joe Trippi. "Governor Dean's record as a centrist on health care and balancing the budget speaks for itself."

As founder of the DLC, From has been pushing the Democratic Party to the right for nearly 20 years. He was in tall cotton, philosophically speaking, when an early leader of the DLC, Bill Clinton, was elected president in 1992. As Clinton's domestic policy guru, Reed pushed New Democrat ideas -- such as welfare reform -- that were often unpopular with party liberals.

"We are increasingly confident that President Bush can be beaten next year, but Dean is not the man to do it," Reed and From wrote. "Most Democrats aren't elitists who think they know better than everyone else."

That article by a David Von Drehle is no longer available at the WP as far as I can see.

See how easy it all was? Lots of rich donors, overlooking the convention floor from 54 stories high? Not bad.

And their power over the party has never ended.[link:http://|

March 3, 2016

Too many Democrats too obligated to big money to speak for the people now.

The party started taking corporate money in the late 80s so they did not have to take stands for the people. Once the obligation is there, change is very hard.

Since the late 80s the party has openly shoved its left aside. And yet...

they fully expect us to forget all about that and in the famous words of Bill Clinton..."fall in line".

He said it was okay for us to "fall in love" with our candidates, but then we were to do what was expected of us at the end.

There's been open declaration over and over of how they did not need the left anymore. They said they were getting enough corporate money, and they did not have to stand for things that might cause them to lose. They had enough money that they did not have to worry about the needs of the people who had been the usual constituents of the party. They had theirs. They didn't need us.

But now they do. Funny how that happens during every primary, every election. They push us aside until they need us, then they put us on a huge freaking guilt trip.

If the party loses they drag out the trite stuff about how they got too partisan, about how the left failed to vote. Any excuse except what really happened.

It is not just supposition on my part, the leaders who took us in the direction of big money said so in their very own words.

Simon Rosenberg 2001:
SNIP..."Simon Rosenberg, the former field director for the DLC who directs the New Democrat Network, a spin-off political action committee, says, "We're trying to raise money to help them lessen their reliance on traditional interest groups in the Democratic Party. In that way," he adds, "they are ideologically freed, frankly, from taking positions that make it difficult for Democrats to win."

..... Rob Shapiro, the DLC VP at the time, and a Clinton advisor, spoke clearly about their purpose.

What we've done in the Democratic Party," explains institute Vice President Rob Shapiro, a Clinton economic adviser, "is an intellectual leveraged buyout." The DLC, presumably, is acting as arbitrageur, selling off unprofitable mind-sets to produce a lean and efficient philosophy for the "New Democrat," as DLCers call their slick bimonthly magazine.

These folks who wanted to be beholden to big money rather than stand for things that were good for the people of the party said openly they were going to take over the party.

Their own words:

To give you a sense of how sprawling From’s legacy actually is, consider the following. Bill Clinton chaired the From’s organization, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and used it as a platform to ascend to the Presidency in 1992. His wife Hillary is a DLC proponent. Al Gore and Joe Biden were DLCers. Barack Obama is quietly an adherent to the “New Democrat” philosophy crafted by From, so are most of the people in his cabinet, and the bulk of the Senate Democrats and House Democratic leaders. From 2007–2011, the New Democrats were the swing bloc in the U.S. House of Representatives, authoring legislation on bailouts and financial regulation of derivatives. And given how Democrats still revere Clinton, so are most Democratic voters, at this point. The DLC no longer exists, but has been folded into the Clinton’s mega-foundation, the Clinton Global Initiative, a convening point for the world’s global elite that wants to, or purports to want to, do good. In other words, it’s Al From’s Democratic Party, we just live here.

How they got started:

Recruiting Bill Clinton

We discovered that we were losing because middle-class voters, voters at the heart of the electorate, had voted Republican in 1988 by a 5-4 margin. The reason was that they did not trust Democrats to handle the issues they cared about most. In a Time magazine survey a week before the election, voters said that Republicans would do a better job than Democrats of maintaining a strong defense by 65–22; of keeping the economy strong by 55–33; of keeping inflation under control by 51–29; and, of curbing crime by 49–32. Those were the issues that drove presidential elections, and until the perception on them changed, Democrats simply were not going to be competitive.

Armed with this knowledge, we launched a four-part strategy to change the Democratic Party.

In other words they wanted to be more like the Republican Party so they could win, they thought.

A little after four o’clock on the afternoon of April 6, 1989, I walked into the office of Governor Bill Clinton on the second floor of the Arkansas State Capitol in Little Rock.

“I’ve got a deal for you,” I told Clinton after a few minutes of political chitchat. “If you agree to become chairman of the DLC, we’ll pay for your travel around the country, we’ll work together on an agenda, and I think you’ll be president one day and we’ll both be important.” With that proposition, Clinton agreed to become chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, and our partnership was born. With Clinton as its leader, the New Democrat movement that sprung from the DLC over the next decade would change the course of the Democratic Party in the United States and of progressive center-left parties around the world.

.....Clinton looked at the memo and then said, “If I don’t run for reelection, then I’m going to have to make at least $100,000 a year.” A hundred thousand a year probably seemed like a lot of money for Clinton in 1990; his gubernatorial salary was just $35,000 a year—among the lowest of all governors. And if he left the governor’s mansion—he used to quip that he spent most of his life in public housing—he would have had to pay for a place to live for the first time since he was out of office in 1981 and 1982. I told Clinton that I’d be delighted to pay him $100,000 a year to be a full-time chairman of the DLC.

.....I believe you are the right person for the DLC job—and the DLC job is the right job for you. We have the opportunity to redefine the Democratic Party during the next two years. If our efforts lead to a presidential candidacy—whether for you or someone else—we can take over the party, as well.

Yesterday a former president whose wife is running for president campaigned in about 4 polling places in Massachusetts. Last I heard the powers that be in MA and the party were maybe going to look at it if they have time.

Bernie Sanders has done amazingly well in a campaign in which the DNC is supporting his opponent openly. His fundraising is record-breaking, with many donors still left to tap again for funds.

He is not obligated to big money, it is not like a chain pulling him down.

He can stand for the people while others with the corporate obligations can not.