Nearly half of the voters in the West Virginia Democratic primary who backed Bernie Sanders say they would vote for Republican Donald Trump in the fall presidential election, according to exit polls reported by CBS News.

Stephanopoulos asked Schweizer for hard evidence, and the author immediately tried to change the subject. The This Week host kept asking the author for a smoking gun, and all he could provide was a “pattern of behavior.”

It became very clear during this interview that there is no evidence that would merit a criminal investigation. Schweizer could not produce the smoking gun because there is no smoking gun.

Schweizer’s attempts to connect the Clinton Cash allegations and the McDonnell and Menendez cases were flimsy and did not hold up to the gentlest of inspections. In Gov. McDonnell’s case, there was evidence the governor promoted the donor’s company as a result of illegal gifts and loans. Sen. Menendez was charged because federal prosecutors believe that a case can be made that the senator used his position to intervene in Medicaid billing disputes in exchange for campaign contributions.

Schweizer’s argument that the three cases are equal is simply not true. There is no evidence that any donors to The Clinton Foundation received special treatment from former Sec. of State Clinton, which is why the mainstream press is not pushing the Clinton Cash scandal.

One of the main allegations in Schweizer’s congressional insider trading book had to be retracted after his claim that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) committed insider trading was found to be factually incorrect and wrong.

The Washington Post and New York Times harmed their own credibility by attaching themselves to partisan conspiracy theory book that doesn’t measure up to the basic standards of journalism.

The Clinton Cash scandal will live on the ozone of right-wing conspiracy theories and conservative media, but there is no evidence to support these claims. ABC News can’t find it. The New York Times can’t find it. The Washington Post can’t find it.

By the end of the interview, Schweizer sounded like a conspiracy theorist, and it was clear that Clinton Cash is the latest in a long line of empty and time wasting right-wing conspiracies.

Clinton Cash has been crushed by the facts.

That's not my opinion. That's what the data says.


DW-NOMINATE is a method for analyzing data on preferences, such as voting data, developed by political scientists Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal. Unlike the scoring done by interest groups, DW-NOMINATE doesn't rely on subjective determinations of what constitutes a liberal vote or a conservative vote--it sorts members of a population according to how similar each member's choices are to those of other members of the population. Two senators who vote the same way 90 percent of the time will be much closer to each other than two senators who only vote the same way 10 percent of the time. Poole and Rosenthal have used this method to discover some interesting statistics and trends going back to the First Congress in 1787-89.

Using House and Senate roll call votes as inputs, DW-NOMINATE has been used to chart every member of every Congress in a two-dimensional space. The primary dimension corresponds strongly to conventional notions of the liberal-conservative axis in modern politics, while the significance of the secondary axis tends to change over time (traditionally it tended to highlight the distance between Dixiecrats and the rest of the Democratic party; today it's kind of a more nebulous indicator of social and cultural differences and is, in my opinion, not particularly interesting). The point is that we can sort the members of a particular Congress by their scores on the primary dimension to easily rank them from most liberal to most conservative based entirely on their own voting data.

And when we do this for the period in which Hillary Clinton was in the Senate, here's what we get:

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As it turns out, with a first-dimension score of -0.391 based upon her entire service in Congress, Hillary Clinton was the 11th most liberal member of the Senate in each of the 107th, 108th, 109th, and 110th Congresses. That places her slightly to the left of Pat Leahy (-0.386), Barbara Mikulski (-0.385) and Dick Durbin (-0.385); clearly to the left of Joe Biden (-0.331) and Harry Reid (-0.289); and well to the left of moderate Democrats like Jon Tester (-0.230), Blanche Lincoln (-0.173), and Claire McCaskill (-0.154).
Some more numbers from the 110th Congress, to further help put things in perspective:


Most liberal Dem 1      Sanders -0.523
                       11           CLINTON -0.391
Median Dem      33           Biden -0.331
Most conservative Dem     51 B. Nelson -0.035
Most liberal Rep 52 Specter 0.061
Median Rep 76 McConnell 0.409
Most conservative Rep 101 Coburn 0.809


Oh, and a certain junior Senator from Illinois, Obama I think his name was? At -0.367, he ranked 23rd in the 110th Congress.

Comparing votes is hardly a perfect way to measure ideology, but it is by far the best method available to bring a measure of quantitative rigor to this inherently subjective topic, and political scientists and statisticians have long relied on DW-NOMINATE for insights about politics and voting behavior. (Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight.com make extensive use of it to power their own results, for example.)

Like everyone else on Earth who does not wear my clothes and kiss my wife in the morning, Hillary Clinton disagrees with me on some things. The same is true for everyone here, and some of those differences may be profound. That is a conversation we can have. But suggestions that she is "a liberal republican or a conservative dem," to take one example of a quotation I read today, should stop here. By her voting record in Congress, Hillary Clinton is squarely in the mainstream of the national Democratic party in America, and would be a good ideological fit for it as its nominee. If anyone tries to tell you differently, ask them to show their work.

A bunch of reporters have recently discovered a shocking truth: Hillary Clinton is liberal! (I heard a rumor that Columbo has been helping with the investigation.)

We’ve gotten this raft of “Clinton is liberal” exposés as Clinton has revved up her 2016 campaign, speaking out in support of gay marriage, a pathway to citizenship for immigrants in the U.S. illegally, and criminal justice reform. But what many of these articles miss is that Clinton has always been, by most measures, pretty far to the left. When she’s shifted positions, it has been in concert with the entire Democratic Party.

To see how these different issues fit together to form an overall political ideology, we usually use three metrics: one based on congressional voting record, one based on public statements and one based on fundraising.

Clinton was one of the most liberal members during her time in the Senate. According to an analysis of roll call votes by Voteview, Clinton’s record was more liberal than 70 percent of Democrats in her final term in the Senate. She was more liberal than 85 percent of all members. Her 2008 rival in the Democratic presidential primary, Barack Obama, was nearby with a record more liberal than 82 percent of all members — he was not more liberal than Clinton.

Clinton also has a history of very liberal public statements. Clinton rates as a “hard core liberal” per the OnTheIssues.org scale. She is as liberal as Elizabeth Warren and barely more moderate than Bernie Sanders. And while Obama is also a “hard core liberal,” Clinton again was rated as more liberal than Obama.

Sometimes I wonder whether people are confusing Clinton with her husband. Bill Clinton’s statements have been far more moderate. He has also had a more moderate donor base, according to Adam Bonica’s fundraising scores.
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Barring some kind of miracle landslide wins in New York and California’s primaries, it looks like the Bernie Sanders campaign is going to lose the race for the Democratic nomination. So now we’re onto the phase where his supporters argue that even though he lost the primary, he is still the winner anyway, of some large and abstract and noble battle beyond the griminess of the polls.

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Mitchell isn’t wrong that left-leaning Americans have been drifting leftward, but trying to turn that into a triumphalist narrative of Sanders over the evil centrists is just wrong-headed. If anything, the Sanders campaign is a throwback, recycling 90s-era complaints about neoliberalism and claims that the Democratic party is so hopelessly corrupt that only an outsider with no loyalties to the party can fix it. It’s as if the past two decades haven’t even happened.

The reality is that Clinton’s campaign is much more representative of the liberalization trend than Sanders is. Despite the loud honking about centrism and DINOs coming from the Sanders camp, the truth is that the Democratic party is not a cluster of recalcitrant centrists and conservatives. The Democrats have been drifting leftward for decades now. Not as fast as the Republicans have been drifting rightward, because that’s impossible, but, even though it might be hard for Sanders fans to swallow, the movement to the left has been quite steady.

Clinton herself is part of this trend, with a Senate record that put her in the top third of most liberal Democrats, and even to the left of President Obama. She’s certainly more liberal than her husband, in part because her career as a politician started when his ended, meaning that she’s tracked left as the party has on issues like gay marriage and immigration. No wonder she voted with Sanders 93% of the time.

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While the Sanders base is appealingly young, there is a major problem with the assumption that his base represents some kind of demographic future: They aren’t particularly diverse. On the contrary, the Sanders base looks disturbingly like the Republican base, dominated by white men. Clinton has won women in all but three states: New Hampshire, Vermont, and Wisconsin, and in Wisconsin, Sanders only got 50% of women. Clinton continues to crush with black voters and is doing much better than Sanders with Hispanic voters, as well.

~~
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[font size="3"]
On the gender front, the Monkey Cage pored over the data regarding the age gap between Democratic women — older women are more pro-Clinton, younger women more pro-Sanders — to see if it really is an age thing or if something else is going on. The results complicate the notion that older voters are supporting Clinton out of some kind of conservatism. On the contrary, it suggests that Clinton support is tied strongly to being more liberal on issues of gender justice.

What the researchers found was women who had faced sexism in their own professional lives were more likely to support Clinton. The older you are, the more likely you’ve dealt with gender injustice, either from having a childcare conflict or from facing discrimination at work, leading to greater levels of Clinton support in those age groups. But for women in the 18-29 age group, having experienced discrimination or childcare conflicts also led to greater levels of support. All in all, it suggests not that Clinton supporters are more conservative at all, but that they are more liberal and tuned into the issue of gender inequality.[/font]
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LOUISVILLE — Hillary Clinton is putting up an unexpected fight in Kentucky, a state that her campaign had thought until quite recently might be out of reach in her primary race against Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

In advance of Tuesday’s Democratic primary, Sanders also campaigned heavily in Kentucky over the weekend, and Clinton planned two additional days there, a sign that she thinks she has a chance to stop Sanders from racking up an unbroken string of victories between now and the end of primary voting in June.

Oregon’s primary will also be held Tuesday, by mail-in ballot. Republicans held their primary in Kentucky in March. Republicans will vote in Oregon Tuesday, even though Donald Trump was declared the presumptive nominee after his victory in Indiana two weeks ago.

There is little recent public polling in Kentucky, but the Clinton campaign hopes to benefit from a different political environment than the one that greeted her in nearby West Virginia, a state she lost last week by 15 points.{West Virginia has an open primary - subject to Republicans sliding in calling themselves 'independants' and voting for Bernie, their preferred candidate_Bill USA}

For instance, Kentucky will hold a closed primary, shutting out independents who have heavily favored Sanders in other contests.
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Sen. Bernie Sanders and his boosters are intensifying their courtship of convention delegates who could determine the winner of the Democratic presidential nomination, prompting some party leaders and supporters of front-runner Hillary Clinton to claim harassment.

The Sanders campaign says it has no connection to the efforts of outside supporters to lean on superdelegates, the party leaders and elected officials who can cast nomination votes for any candidate and who are seen as increasingly pivotal in the Democrats’ unexpectedly drawn-out nominating contest.

Among those efforts is a website created last week under the name Superdelegate Hit List, providing phone numbers and addresses for superdelegates and encouraging users to submit further contact information, presumably to help advocates pressure them. Site creator Spencer Thayer, a Chicago activist, described the goal this way in a Twitter message: “So who wants to help start .?.?. a new website aimed at harassing Democratic Superdelegates?”

Longtime Democratic National Committee member and superdelegate Bob Mulholland wrote a letter to Sanders last week excoriating the candidate for not calling out his supporters for their “bullying” of superdelegates.
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Dear Senator Bernie Sanders,

I have heard many complaints from other unbound Delegates to our National Convention in Philadelphia (my hometown), about getting harassing emails, Facebook postings and phone calls, even to one woman at 10:30 at night, from some of your supporters demanding that we support you. We would expect this type of bullying tactics from Trump supporters. Roger Stone threatened on April 5th- he will send angry Trump supporters to the hotel rooms (Cleveland) of any delegates who betrays Donald. Do you have a similar Plan?

I have seen you on TV stating (demanding to many of your supporters) that Superdelegates should vote for the candidate that won their state. Really? Where is that in the National Delegate Plan that former Vermont Governor Howard Dean must vote for you? Congressman Raul Grijalva, a supporter of yours, who represents the 3rd district in Arizona, a state that voted 58% for Clinton and Grijalva's own district voted 61.7% for Clinton has not switched. Where is your letter to Congressman Grijalva, instructing him to shift his support to Clinton? Look in the mirror- you'll see a political hypocrite! From what I hear, Congressman Grijalva, when asked if he is shifting his support to Clinton, his response- drop dead. That is his right- he is a Congressman, thus a delegate.

Society has been trying to deal with High School bullies and the same Rule should apply to your campaign and your supporters. Us active Democrats enjoy healthy discussions and debates at meetings, Caucuses and Conventions but it is unacceptable for us to get harassing communications from bullies. As a Clinton supporter, I have not received harassing phone calls but it does appear women DNC Members are getting the brunt of the threats. Professionally, campaign staff and representatives should be the ones calling delegates. A 12 year old child answering the phone at home should not be hearing threats.

Most of us DNC Members have been in the Democratic Party vineyards for years, as have the Clintons. For me it has been over 40 years. I became disillusioned with the war in Vietnam (I had volunteered for the Paratroopers and Vietnam), after being wounded in March 1968 (101st Airborne), it was the beginning for me to turning to politics. So those of us with callouses on our Democratic Party hands (something lacking with you, not even going to our National Conventions to vote for our nominees), we notice things, such as not one US Senator is supporting you. Not even Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy. We noticed what you said to Rachel Maddow (March 30, 2016) when she said that Secretary Clinton has raised millions for the Democratic Party (DNC, DCCC, DSCC and State Parties) and asked you- will you do the same? You said, "We'll see." I fell off my chair. The Koch brothers announced a $900 million dollar plan against Democrats, and we have a big ticket from Governors to Congress to races in all states and your answer- we'll see. Our nominee for President has to help raise tens of millions of dollars all over our country. We cannot afford a selfish nominee.

I would urge that you and your staff publicly state that you want all harassing communications to DNC members to stop. In 2008, I received a phone call from a US Senator, urging me to support Senator Obama - a very professional and courteous call.

Sincerely,

Bob Mulholland
DNC Member
Chico, CA

P.S. In case no one clued you in- that NY Times piece (April 4, 2016) with Jeff Weaver and Tad Devine providing "background material," is a standard practice by some consultants. They are getting very nervous. They are laying out the "DNA evidence," that the candidate (you) will lose and it is your fault, not theirs. A suggestion for you- you need to be better prepared yourself- you're coming across as shrill.

P.P.S. Secretary Clinton has received about 58% of the vote so far, thus ahead of you by 2,400,000 votes and 250 Pledged Delegates. We also notice that the Base of our Party is voting overwhelmingly for Secretary Clinton.

Hillary Clinton impersonated Donald Trump at an event Monday, mocking the presumptive Republican nominee during a speech where the former secretary of state pretended to be in a general election debate.

Clinton, somewhat taking on Trump's New York affect, knocked the businessman-turned-politician for lack of specificity on his economic plans.



"Let's just imagine I am on a debate stage with Donald Trump," Clinton said to applause. "Now personally, I am really looking forward to that."

Then she got into the impression, "So let's suppose, here is the question, 'so what is your plan to create jobs,' His answer is, 'I am going to create them, they are going to be great, I am going to do it. But I am not telling you what it is that I am going to do.'"

She then added, using a quick cadence to show she has specifics, "I am going to say, 'Here is what we are going to do, here is what we are going to do, here is how we are going to change the tax code, here is how we are going to incentivize people to do it.'"

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[font size="3"]Nevada's process for sending delegates to the national convention in Philadelphia is among the most complex. When the state caucused in late February, the fourth state on the calendar for the Democratic Party, the results of that process favored Hillary Clinton. Twenty-three of the 35 total bound delegates were given out proportionally in the state's four congressional districts, giving Clinton a delegate lead of 13 to 10. The results of the caucus suggested that after the state convention — which bound the state's seven at-large delegates and five delegates who are elected officials or party leaders — Clinton would end up with a 20-to-15 lead over Bernie Sanders, with Clinton winning one more delegate from the at-large pool (4-to-3) and one more from the party-leader pool (3-to-2) than Sanders.[/font]

[div class="excerpt" style="border:solid 1px #000000;"]NOTE: if you adjust the 13:10 (total of 23) delegate apportionment to a 35 delegate count (as in the 20:15 delegate split mentiooned above - arrived at after the State convention) you end up with a delegate split of 20:15 (note 20 was arrived at by rounding 19.5 to 20). Note that 35/23 = 1.52. Multiply the delegate split of 13:10 by 1.52. ... thus: 13x 1.52= 19.78, 10 x 1.52 = 15.2. These numbers were rounded to get the 20:15 split. _Bill USA