October 22, 2015

Americans MORE Optimistic About Sanders’ Presidency Than About Any Other Candidate

An unprecedented number of major party candidates are running for president. Yet, Americans remain pessimistic about the entire presidential field going into 2016. An NBC/WSJ poll asked Americans about individual candidates and whether they were optimistic/satisfied or uncertain/pessimistic about the ability of each individual candidate to do a good job as president. With every candidate, more voters were uncertain or pessimistic than optimistic or satisfied, but of the announced candidates, voters were less pessimistic about Bernie Sanders than any of the other candidates. 43 percent of American voters expressed optimism about a Sanders’ presidency, compared to 50 percent who did not. His net (-7) optimism to pessimism score was better than Hillary Clinton’s (-13) or any of the Republican candidates.


Voters were much more optimistic about both Sanders and Clinton than they were about GOP front-runner Donald Trump (-35), Texas Senator Ted Cruz (-32), former Florida Governor Jeb Bush (-26) or former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina (-24). The only Republicans that voters were not deeply pessimistic about were Florida Senator Marco Rubio (-13) and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson (-8). Joe Biden, who announced on Wednesday that he was not seeking the presidency, was the one potential candidate who generated slightly more optimism than Sanders. 46 percent of American voters would have viewed a Biden presidency optimistically compared to 52 percent who would have been uncertain or pessimistic. Americans have become so pessimistic that even the best candidates only inspire tepid optimism. Nevertheless, it is clear that Sanders, and to a slightly lesser extent, Clinton, give Americans more cause for optimism than most of the GOP candidates.


http://www.politicususa.com/2015/10/21/americans-optimistic-sanders-presidency-candidates.html

October 22, 2015

Bernie Sanders Reads From The Passover Haggadah In Hebrew And Jokes With His Seder Hosts

MANCHESTER CENTER, Vt. – Bernie Sanders reads from the Passover Haggadah in Hebrew and jokes with his seder hosts about finding hametz, traces of leavening, after they have thoroughly cleaned the house in preparation for the holiday. The presidential candidate, a socialist competing for the Democratic nomination, also follows Israeli politics close enough to understand the influence of the haredi Orthodox parties in government. And like many Jews of his generation, Sanders, 74, chafes at what he sees as disproportionate critical attention applied to Israel. But little of this emerges in his public profile. More has been written about the Judaism of his Brooklyn childhood than his interactions with the faith and community today.



As a politico, Sanders appears averse to hugs, Jewish or otherwise. Consider his awkward handshake with Hillary Rodham Clinton during the first Democratic presidential debate last week after he said her use of personal emails while in government shouldn’t be a campaign focus.



The Jewish Vermonters who know Sanders say his reluctance to make his Judaism central to his public persona is a function of his preference for the economic over the esoteric, as well as a libertarianism typical both of the state and its Jewish community – one that embraces expressions of faith and the lack of them. Sanders, like many Jews who came here in the 1960s and 1970s, migrated to Vermont for reasons having little to do with his Judaism. He once told NPR that travel brochures he saw as a teenager depicting the state’s open spaces attracted him in the mid-’60s. Sanders, his first wife and his older brother bought 85 acres of land for $2,500. (Sanders has been married twice. His first wife is Jewish, his current spouse is not.) Ben Scotch, a lawyer who for decades worked in the state attorney general’s office and for the American Civil Liberties Union, said he and Sanders were part of a generation of Jews who supplanted the state’s more conventional Jewish community. “The children of Jewish families that settled here generations ago frequently looked at Vermont and said, ‘What are we doing here, this is no place to identify as Jews, the real Jewish centers are in the cities,’ and they doffed their hats,” said Scotch, who lives in Montpelier, the state capital, and knows Sanders through his dealings with government.



Eventually, many of the new Jewish migrants found Jewish community, albeit one that worked with Vermont’s counterculture. Montpelier today is home to four female rabbis, three Reconstructionists and one who identifies as Orthodox, having attended a transdenominational rabbinical school. The Orthodox-identifying rabbi, Tobie Weisman, said she has encountered an abundance of stories like Scotch’s through her group, Yearning for Learning, which organizes Jewish programming throughout the state.For example, she asked the owner of a local gelato shop what ingredients he used to ascertain whether the desserts would be suitable for the kosher-observant, only to find out that the man’s mother was Jewish. Several months later, the shop owner was seeking advice on how to make horseradish-flavored gelato for a seder.




cont'

http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/A-look-into-the-Jewish-side-of-US-presidential-candidate-Bernie-Sanders-428701

October 22, 2015

Bernie Sanders HUNG OUT With Doc From Back To The Future

Doc Brown is feeling the Bern.

That is, Christopher Lloyd, the actor who played the zany scientist in the Back to the Future film franchise, took some time on Wednesday to pose in character for a photo alongside Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders. The date was not coincidental, of course, as Oct. 21, 2015, is the day Doc and pal Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) travel to in a time-tripping DeLorean.

Posting the photo to Twitter, Sanders wrote, “Tell me, future boy, who’s President of the United States in 2017? ‘Bernie Sanders.’ Bernie Sanders?! From Vermont?”


cont'

http://www.ew.com/article/2015/10/21/bernie-sanders-doc-back-to-the-future

October 21, 2015

Chris Matthews - JB Speech:"People in Hillaryland Right Now Listening To This Are NOT HAPPY With It"

October 21, 2015

Non-Candidate Joe Biden Is ATTACKING Hillary Clinton for Some Reason

Either Joe Biden is gearing up for his entry into the 2016 race, or he just thinks Hillary Clinton needs to be taken down a peg. The vice president never mentioned the Democratic front-runner by name, but at an event honoring former Vice President Walter Mondale on Tuesday evening, he took aim at Clinton's boast during last week's debate that she's proud to count the Republicans among her enemies. "It is necessary to end this notion that the enemy is the other party, end this notion that it’s naive to think we can speak well of the other party and cooperate," Biden said. Earlier, during a conversation with Mondale, Biden noted that he's flown more than one million miles to meet with world leaders, echoing Clinton, who frequently points out that she traveled 956,733 miles as secretary of state. "We've had two great secretaries of state," he said, "but when I go, they know that I am speaking for the president. There is nothing missed between the lip and the cup. Whatever I say, the president is saying."


Biden also challenged Clinton's oblique suggestion during the debate that she's running for a third Obama term. He claimed that for the past seven years, he's spent five to seven hours a day with the president. "I attend every meeting the president has — at his request," Biden said, adding that they are "simpatico" on every major issue. And what about the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden, that one very notable occasion when Biden and Obama weren't in sync? Well, Biden spent the day revising that story, so now he was completely behind the decision to send in special forces. During a Democratic congressional retreat in 2012, Biden suggested that while nearly everyone else in the room hedged, he told the president he should gather more intelligence before launching the attack. He recalled advising Obama, "my suggestion is, don't go. We have to do two more things to see if he's there.'" Obama backed this up in the third presidential debate in 2012, telling Mitt Romney that others shared his skepticism about the raid. "Even some in my own party, including my current vice president, had the same critique as you did," Obama said.


In 2013, Biden began shifting his account of what happened in the Situation Room, saying he told the president to follow his instincts. Before an audience at George Washington University on Tuesday morning, his account continued to evolve. This time he said he withheld his opinion in front of other officials, and suggested sending one more surveillance drone over the compound. But he said in private, he encouraged the president to send in a team of Navy SEALs. "As we walked out of the room and went upstairs, I told him my opinion, that I said that I thought he should go but to follow his own instincts," Biden said. Former White House chief of staff Bill Daley said on Tuesday that the meeting went down as Biden described it, but in previous accounts from other officials, including Clinton, they've suggested Biden was wary of launching an attack. During the debate in Las Vegas, Clinton said she was one of the few advisers who supported "the tough decision that President Obama had to make about Osama bin Laden."



cont'

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/10/joe-biden-attacks-hillary-clinton.html#

October 21, 2015

Hillary’s Libya Post-War Plan Was ‘PLAY IT BY EAR,’ Gates Says

When Hillary Clinton appears before Congress’s special committee on Benghazi Thursday, she’ll likely be asked all the wrong questions. Clinton will be peppered with queries about why she kept a private email server, what caused the 2012 attacks on the U.S. special consulate in Benghazi, and how come U.S. forces didn’t respond more quickly to the strikes. But the really important issues—the questions longstanding followers of the U.S. and NATO intervention want answered—are: Why did Hillary Clinton push for strikes that contributed to the fall of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi? And why didn’t the Obama administration bother to plan for the all-too-predictable chaos that came next?

In 2011, as the United States considered intervention, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was among those who pushed for intervention—without resolving just how Libya would be governed after Gaddafi, according to a senior defense official who was part of the decision-making process. Obama advisers like Samantha Power and Susan Rice also made the case alongside Clinton. They argued the U.S. had a moral obligation to save lives in Benghazi facing a threatened genocide by Libyan dictator Gaddafi. The only strategy spelled out publicly was that the Europeans’ newly formed “Libyan Transitional Council” would be at the forefront of the effort. Washington was “leading from behind,” to use a famous phrase from the era.

As then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who opposed the U.S. intervention, frustratingly explained to The Daily Beast: “We were playing it by ear.” And the consequences of that improvisation are still being felt today. The country is an epicenter of the refugee crisis sweeping the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe. Part of Libya is under the control of the self-proclaimed Islamic State. And the Russians use the U.S.-NATO intervention in Libya to justify their own military incursions in places like Syria. But to Clinton, Libya was—and still remains—a major achievement. “We came, we saw, he died,” she crowed in October 2011. “Smart power at its best” is how Clinton described it during the most recent Democratic debate.


Clinton campaign aides note that she spent months working with the Libyan parliament to craft a successful state in both the run-up to American intervention and afterward, all while honoring a Libyan request for limited Western intervention. Above all else, the aides stress, the United States had a moral obligation to act in Libya. “The alternative was so bleak, we simply had to take action,” one aide to the Clinton campaign told The Daily Beast. President Obama, however, didn’t see things quite that way. He was reportedly reluctant about the operation—until Clinton, Rice, and Power swayed him, over Gates’s objections. “Clinton won the bureaucratic battle to use DOD [Department of Defense] resources to achieve what’s essentially the State Department’s objective,” Steve Clemons, then an analyst with the administration-friendly New America Foundation, told Foreign Policy at the time.



cont'

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/10/20/hillary-s-libya-post-war-plan-was-play-it-by-ear-gates-says.html

October 20, 2015

HRC FAKES A Southern Accent in Alabama, Try Not to CRINGE

She just can't help herself........she didn't talk this way at the debates......





Hillary's closing statement at the debates. Listen to them both. You judge.

October 20, 2015

BONG! After Upset Election, Canada's New Leader Wants to LEGALIZE MARIJUANA

Led by Justin Trudeau, Canada's Liberal Party swept to an impressive victory in Monday's elections. The party has won enough seats to form a majority government by itself. The Liberals won 184 seats in the lower house of parliament. . They only need 170 seats to form a majority in the 338-seat lower chamber. The election brings an end to nine years of Conservative rule, which, from a drug policy perspective, was absolutely regressive and reactionary. The Tories not only opposed marijuana legalization; they were committed to rolling out mandatory minimum sentences for some drug offenses, including pot cultivation, and they fought bitterly (and unsuccessfully) to shut down Vancouver's supervised injection site for hard-core drug users. The Tories rejected harm reduction in favor of failed 20th Century drug policies.

The Liberal platform included, among other things, marijuana legalization:



But don't expect it to happen overnight. The Liberals said they would create a task force with input from experts in public health, substance use, and law enforcement to design a new system of taxed and regulated marijuana sales. Once the task force has done its work, a bill will have to be crafted and then passed in Ottawa. While marijuana was not the issue in the campaign, it was an issue. The Conservatives attempted drug war-style scare ads, and outgoing Prime Minister Stephen Harper said marijuana was "infinitely worse than tobacco." But the Tories' anti-pot stance didn't fare too well in a country that is ready to leave marijuana prohibition behind. In a CBC Vote Compass poll last month, 56% of respondents wanted legalization, another 30% wanted decriminalization, and only 14% wanted the prohibitionist stat us quo.

Now, the voters should be about to get their wish.


cont'

http://www.alternet.org/drugs/liberal-victory-marijuana-legalization-canadian-agenda

October 20, 2015

Firefighters' Union Chief Says Group PREPARING for Biden Candidacy

October 20, 2015

Bernie Sanders On WORKING With Republicans