Bernie supporters are so creative: Fantastic poster: Not Me Us

If there's one thing that has been illuminated this primary, it's corruption.

And I mean corruption within the democratic party. The list is too long to detail exhaustively, but a couple of highlights easily come to mind.

The DNC favoring Hillary to the degree that they're functioning as an arm (and a powerful one) of the Clinton campaign. And that is no exaggeration. From the whole debate thing to DSW lifting the Obama ban on lobbyist and PAC donations to benefit Hillary. Any reasonable person should clearly be able to see that the DNC has put both hands on the scale.

Hillary's pack of lobbyist fundraisers. Legal is not the same as ethical.

A Democratic U.S. Representative clearly influenced by Pay Day Lenders.

The ridiculous antics of Hillary superfan and Iowa DNC chair, Andy McGuire.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/democratic-groups-move-to-ramp-up-financial-firepower-for-clinton/2016/02/12/23ca8e00-d1b1-11e5-abc9-ea152f0b9561_story.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/david-scott-payday-loan_us_56c4e13fe4b08ffac1276db5

Yes, Bernie Sanders can win the black and Hispanic minority vote

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Can he attract African Americans, Latinos and other minorities nationwide? And does Sanders — an avowed democratic socialist — have the ability to do this while finding ways to win over white voters beyond the progressives fueling his surprising rise? In short, does the Sanders campaign have legs?

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Which highlights another feature of Sanders’s repertoire: Attack ads seem to boomerang. Sanders has perfected a kind of political jujitsu whereby he turns his opponents’ aggression against them by declining to respond in kind. This worked in 2005, when Republican Richard Tarrant told voters “not a single business will move to Vermont” if Sanders won a Senate seat. Sanders ignored him and won 70 percent to 30 percent.

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senator has leveraged his represention of a rural state. “Bernie has built ties to farmers across the country,” says Dexter Randall, a seventh-generation dairy farmer in Vermont’s remote “Northeast Kingdom.” “He gets us. He speaks our language.” He gets veterans, too. After Sanders voted against a 1991 resolution supporting the Gulf War, veterans turned their backs on him at a Burlington event. Chagrined, he began catering to vets, and he’s found a way to straddle the fault line between questioning the military budget and supporting those who serve. The Veterans Affairs reform bill he crafted with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in 2014 strengthened this bond.

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That's the skeptics’ biggest question. Pundits love to compare Sanders’s campaign to the failed efforts of stalwart liberals such as Howard Dean, George McGovern and Eugene McCarthy. They roll out Republican Barry Goldwater. But these are extraordinary times. A great many voters seem receptive to Sanders’s brand of political revolution. If he can calibrate the 1960s rhetoric to the moment, persuade minorities to join his fight and build on his connections with Middle American constituencies, his campaign could go much further than anyone — even Sanders himself — ever thought possible.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/yes-bernie-sanders-can-win-the-black-and-hispanic-minority-vote/2016/02/17/da6eb544-d118-11e5-88cd-753e80cd29ad_story.html

Bernie Sanders versus the Pentagon

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Since he arrived in Congress, Bernie Sanders has been a fierce crusader against Pentagon spending, calling for defense cuts that few Democrats have been willing to support. Should he defeat Hillary Clinton, analysts say, he will likely be the biggest critic of the Pentagon to win a major party nomination since World War II.

“He fits in that category of very liberal members of the U.S. Senate that have consistently attacked the Pentagon time and time again because they want the money to go to the entitlement side, even at a time when the world is more unstable and more dangerous,” said Arnold Punaro, a retired Marine Corps major general who served as Democratic staff director on the Senate Armed Services Committee in the 1980s.

That position might benefit Sanders with liberal primary voters. But Democrats focused on national security fear it could be a liability in a general election among moderate voters more worried about terrorism and growing aggression from Russia and China. Some suggested that, if nominated, Sanders would struggle to win support and endorsements from Democratic-leaning retired military officials.


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Sanders’ defenders say the notion that the Pentagon’s $573 billion budget is filled with waste is hardly radical and insist that his tough line on military spending will appeal to voters of all stripes.

“This is why people are so attracted to Sanders — because he’s telling it like it is,” said Lawrence Korb, a former Pentagon official under President Ronald Reagan whom Sanders recently named as a possible secretary of defense. Korb said billions of savings are achievable at a Pentagon that has what he called “a management problem.”


Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/bernie-sanders-defense-budget-pentagon-219386#ixzz40XfkjjQh

The Price Is Right for Bernie Sanders in Nevada

The Price Is Right is one of the most overtly capitalist shows on TV, a prolonged infomercial that rewards contestants for their knowledge of the prices of various name-brand consumer goods. But Marco Antonio Regil, the former longtime host of the show's Mexican counterpart Atínale Al Precio, is doing all he can to support Bernie Sanders, a socialist who rails against capitalist greed at every opportunity.

On Wednesday, Regil stopped by a small Sanders phone-banking operation to reach Spanish-speaking voters in Las Vegas. The phone bank was as much a photo-op for the media as it was a full-scale get-out-the-vote drive. Volunteers barely outnumbered reporters—hailing from the New York Times, NPR, CNN, and others—who piled into the house of Jackie Ramos, an enthusiastic Sanders supporter. While volunteers worked through their call sheets, state communications director Emilia Pablo teased them before Regil's arrival. "I know the ladies are waiting for him," she said of the handsome TV star, who has also hosted Spanish-language versions of Family Feud and Dancing With the Stars and the Miss Mexico pageant .

When Regil arrived, he huddled for photos with the fangirl volunteers, and then offered a brief speech detailing why Sanders was his candidate of choice. He described his childhood in Tijuana, when he revered the middle class in the United States that he saw lacking in Latin America. "The class divides in Latin America were one of the saddest thing I grew up experiencing," he said. But that's slipping away, he said, hence the need for Sanders. "I know what happens when income inequality and the classes start dividing, and the gap becomes so big: Poor people start struggling, they cannot survive, and they start getting violent. They start mugging other people."

But he was quick to caution that the socialism that Sanders offers isn't the same as the Latin America version put forward by politicians like Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro. "He calls it Democratic socialism," he said. "I don't like using that word, I prefer using conscious capitalism."


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http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/02/price-right-bernie

Conscious Capitalism. I like it.

To date, Hillary has attended 210+ fundraisers. Bill, 47 and Chelsea 26

By contrast, bernie has attended.... no big money fundraisers, and doesn't have any bundlers. Hill has an army of them.

https://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2016/02/08/a-family-affair-jeb-and-hillarys-election-2016-fundraising-mapped/

Slime Jockey David Brock: Hillary is the "heir"

In brock's sleazy head, Hillary gets credit for all Bill's achievements and all of Obama's.

https://m.

The Super Tuesday States I think Bernie will take

Vermont

Massachusetts

Oklahoma

Minnesota

Colorado

Alaska

IndustryWeek: TPP: Another Nail in the Coffin of American Manufacturing

A new analysis of the proposed Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) argues the most likely outcome of the trade pact will be "job destruction and industry shrinkage."

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The Peterson Institute analyzed the TPP using the "computable general equilibrium (CGE) model." I'm not an economist. I live and work in the real world of manufacturing. Thus, I am not familiar with some of the terms economists use for economic models, and had not heard of this term previously. I tried to find explanations that make sense, but even the Wikipedia definition was complex: "A CGE model consists of (a) equations describing model variables and (b) a database (usually very detailed) consistent with the model equations... CGE models are useful whenever we wish to estimate the effect of changes in one part of the economy upon the rest. For example, a tax on flour might affect bread prices, the CPI, and hence perhaps wages and employment. They have been used widely to analyse trade policy."

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Untrue facts assumed ─ "full employment always exists, trade is in balance, that wages and productivity stay in alignment rather than diverge, and that all countries have perfectly free markets with rational economic behavior." These assumptions are false ─ "full employment rarely exists; trade is almost never in balance; wages have diverged downward from productivity for the past several decades; and many TPP countries have state-directed capitalism or strong industrial policies to influence and alter market outcomes."


Untrue past results ─ The CGE model was used to analyze China's being granted Permanent Normalized Trade Relations with the U.S. (China PNTR) in 2000 and the Korea-U. S. trade (KORUS) agreement in 2012. A reduction in the trade deficits were predicted for both countries, but the reality is that the U. S. trade deficit with China increased from $68.7 billion in 1999 to $337 billion in 2015, and the Korea trade "deficit worsened by $12 billion annually between 2012 (date of KORUS implementation) to 2015." (US Census Bureau)

Untrue assumption of no net job losses─ "The CGE model wrongly assumes that there are no job losses to produce its results. The International Trade Administration assumes that every billion dollars of U.S. exports supported 5,796 jobs, down from 7,117 jobs per billion dollars of U.S. exports in 2009. Conversely, every billion dollars of imports has the opposite result. Thus, where trade agreements result in worsening trade deficits, as is the case for the NAFTA, Korea and China PNTR deals, the job losses are drastic."


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http://m.industryweek.com/trade/tpp-another-nail-coffin-american-manufacturing

Why Reddit for Bernie counts

There are 188,000 members. Reddit for hillary has 4,100.

They don't just talk. They have:

Raised over $1.5 million

Made 67,700 phone calls

Canvassed extensively in Iowa, NH, Nevada and SC.

Created all kinds of apps and tools, from how to caucus for Sanders to sites with exhaustive information about his record.

Supported Bernie candidates running for office, coast to coast.

Kept it civil. Far more civil than DU or daily kos.

Sneered at and dismissed by Hillary fans, it has become a potent tool for Sanders campaign