DES MOINES, Iowa — The room at Bernie Sanders' rally here turned ice cold when Hillary Clinton's speech took over the televisions here.

The crowd booed loudly at first, then cheered when the sound cut out. The sound soon returned and Clinton was drowned out by further boos when she said "I'm a progressive who gets things done."

It escalated from there: Chants of "She's a liar!" took over the room before the campaign just entirely shut off the stream, cutting away from MSNBC entirely.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/blogs/iowa-caucus-2016-live-updates/2016/02/bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton-liar-218599#ixzz3yz3VWGok

Anne Rice
6 hrs ·
Anne here answering the question -- why do I support Hillary now over Bernie? ---- I love Bernie and I love Hillary. I'll vote for whoever is nominated! But I believe Hillary can stop Trump, and I'm not sure Bernie can. I believe Hillary will be the more pragmatic and effective president. I've been watching and listening and this is my conclusion. Hillary I hope will be the nominee. --- . Trump has practically secured the Republican nomination which I never dreamed possible; and I do believe Hillary is the candidate to win against him. ---- And I've come to see that Hillary is the most qualified person ever to run for president, and I've come to the conclusion that Bernie's great heart and idealism may not do as well in the reality of the White House as Hillary's great experience and strength. ---- Hillary's problem as I see it is that she is not a sympathetic or charismatic candidate. She does not communicate warmth and passion the way that Bernie does, or Trump does or Bill Clinton continues to do. But that is a small matter. What matters is her commitment, her experience, her knowledge, her principles, her strength under continuous attack, and her effectiveness at getting things done. She was a great Secretary of State. She was a fine Senator. She was a great First Lady and she tried with all her might and main to bring us some kind of workable health care for all Americans years ago. I love her and support her. I hope Bernie will wind up as VP or in the Cabinet. He will have huge popular support for his brilliant ideas. I hope this answers the question fully as to why I appeared to change my mind. As I said, I have always loved both candidates.
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https://www.facebook.com/annericefanpage/posts/10153962543610452

Only one in three likely Democratic voters in the survey are first-time caucus-goers, who break decidedly toward Sanders. That compares with 60 percent in the final pre-caucus survey of 2008, when a wave of young voters and new participants helped Barack Obama overpower Clinton in Iowa.

In addition, the survey finds Clinton’s support is deeper and sturdier than Sanders’ across many areas, with 53 percent saying they'd be very enthusiastic with her as the party's nominee. Most tellingly, 83 percent of her voters say their minds are made up to support Clinton.

“Most of the ways you look at it, she’s stronger than the three-point race would suggest,” said pollster J. Ann Selzer.

Roxanne Caldwell Fee, 74, a retired teacher from Knoxville, said she was “very proud” that America elected an African-American man as president in 2008, "but now I want to have a woman in there." Four in five surveyed say it's time for a woman president.

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-01-30/bloomberg-politics-des-moines-register-iowa-poll-democrats

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — Hillary Clinton's campaign is calling for an additional Democratic debate to be held in Flint, Michigan, the site of an ongoing water contamination crisis that her campaign has focused on in recent weeks.
“We’ve agreed to an additional debate in N.H. and are currently in discussions to agree to additional debates — we think one of them should be in Flint," said campaign chairman John Podesta in a statement on Saturday afternoon, referring to the ongoing negotiations over scheduling new debates. The Sanders and Clinton camps agreed in principle to schedule new ones earlier on Saturday.
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"The water crisis in Flint is unconscionable. It’s been going on for years, as the people of Flint repeatedly asked for help and were ignored by state government. As Hillary has said, this would not have happened in a wealthy community. It was only when the crisis was finally brought to national attention that real steps were taken to begin to address the immediate issues like access to clean water and health monitoring, and longer term health and infrastructure challenges," said Podesta.


Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/01/hillary-clinton-debate-flint-michigan-218454#ixzz3ylPHWisd

Bernie Sanders’ campaign is trying to rein in his unruly online men. Live by the Redditors, die by the Redditors.
....In fact, top Sanders campaign aides have quietly reached out to senior officials in the Clinton campaign and women like Walsh personally to apologize for Bro behavior. Online, aides are pushing their digital community to police itself and keep the Bros quiet. And some volunteer members of Sanders’s digital army are scrambling into action, reporting offenders and moderating bro-y posts.
Still, the Bros break through, and there’s real worry in corners of Sanders-world about it.
On Thursday, the BBC catalogued social media attacks on black pundits and women who opine on Bernie. Mashable posted a ton of screenshots of Bro attacks Friday morning.
...
None of this is a surprise to people who work in the Sanders campaign or support it online, and the fact that it continues to exist worries them. Every minute and every caucus-goer counts in an Iowa race that Sanders alternated between calling “nip and tuck” and “tied” on the trail Thursday.....
The Iowa town hall hosted by CNN, the last nationally televised forum where all three candidates would share the same stage before the Iowa caucuses, was seen by all sides as a tipping point for the Bros — on Twitter, they ravaged Clinton supporters while Sanders backers looked on in dismay.
Behind the scenes, Casca reached out to the Clinton rapid response director, Christina Reynolds, and to Walsh, via Twitter Direct Message to apologize for the bro behavior.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/evanmcsan/the-bernie-bros?bftwnews&utm_term=.hyoGA3Xlm#.govZYP20K

Bernie Sanders’s ideas are not too bold. They are too facile.

‘IF THE Washington Post wants to say that our ideas are bold, I accept that,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said Thursday in response to a critical editorial we ran about him. “We’ve got to create an economy that works for the middle class. And whether The Washington Post likes it or not, that’s what I intend to do.”

In fact, we would love that — and we were heartened that Mr. Sanders chose to engage with our editorial. Yet our disagreements with Mr. Sanders are not as he portrayed them; they do not concern the problems he chooses to address or the boldness with which he proposes to address them. The nation could use big measures to take on climate change, advance public health, tackle poverty, shore up entitlement programs, boost education, improve our democracy and do all sorts of other things that Mr. Sanders cares about. We argue for policies such as a carbon tax and public campaign financing, even though they are subject to massive and possibly insurmountable political opposition, because they would lead to large and needed changes.

What concerns us is not that Mr. Sanders’s program to tackle these issues is “radical,” as he put it, but that it is not very well thought out. We are far from the only ones, for example, to point out that his health-care plan rests on unbelievable assumptions about how much he could slash health-care costs without affecting the care ordinary Americans receive. “Their savings numbers are — well, politely said — simply wrong,” Emory University health-care expert Kenneth E. Thorpe told Vox. Mr. Thorpe, who is not hostile to single-payer systems of the type Mr. Sanders favors and has even advanced single-payer plans of his own, released an analysis Wednesday finding that Mr. Sanders’s proposal would cost $1 trillion more than the candidate estimated. That is not over a 10-year budget window. That is every year...................

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mr-sanderss-ideas-are-not-too-bold-they-are-too-facile/2016/01/28/e7125bca-c60a-11e5-9693-933a4d31bcc8_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-d%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

Voting with Your Head and Your Heart
Mary Steenburgen
I listened to the radio today as I drove to work on the set of The Last Man on Earth. I heard a young man in Iowa was trying to decide who to vote for, torn between his head and his heart. His heart wanted Bernie Sanders and his head told him to vote for Hillary Clinton. I found myself wishing that I could meet him and speak to both his head and his heart.

..................lots more excellent stuff...................


So I will vote for Hillary with my head and my heart. I will be hopeful that a woman who does think before she speaks is not completely perceived as "guarded," because a man who thinks before he speaks is called "thoughtful." I will hope that people's hearts are touched by her life of service to this country and even the world, that is second to none. I love that my friend, who has seen many of the world's sorrows, is still outraged about what has happened in Flint, Mich. And that fierceness is true to her. There has been no numbing, no inuring, on her part, to the mountains that people face. I LOVE that she has that edge. And I love that she chooses her words in a world where we hang on every one. Much of what is said about her tells us much more about ourselves; how we all still struggle with what a woman in a position of power is supposed to sound like and be like.

But I want every young woman to be as unafraid of her fantastic potential as my friend, the young Hillary Clinton was, and I wish for all of us grandmothers, the still fierce caring for the world, the beautiful well-earned edges and the impenetrable sense of humor that she has today. True, I'm extremely biased, but it's a bias born of knowing someone for almost forty years. So if that helps your heart at all, you're welcome.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mary-steenburgen/voting-with-your-head--yo_b_9104038.html

The Post's View
Sanders’s fiction-filled campaign
By Editorial Board January 27

SEN. BERNIE Sanders (I-Vt.) is leading in New Hampshire and within striking distance in Iowa, in large part because he is playing the role of uncorrupted anti-establishment crusader. But Mr. Sanders is not a brave truth-teller. He is a politician selling his own brand of fiction to a slice of the country that eagerly wants to buy it.
...
Mr. Sanders tops off his narrative with a deus ex machina: He assures Democrats concerned about the political obstacles in the way of his agenda that he will lead a “political revolution” that will help him clear the capital of corruption and influence-peddling. This self-regarding analysis implies a national consensus favoring his agenda when there is none and ignores the many legitimate checks and balances in the political system that he cannot wish away.

Mr. Sanders is a lot like many other politicians. Strong ideological preferences guide his thinking, except when politics does, as it has on gun control. When reality is ideologically or politically inconvenient, he and his campaign talk around it. Mr. Sanders’s success so far does not show that the country is ready for a political revolution. It merely proves that many progressives like being told everything they want to hear.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/bernie-sanderss-fiction-filled-campaign/2016/01/27/cd1b2866-c478-11e5-9693-933a4d31bcc8_story.html