April 22, 2016

Ber-llary: Merging Hillary and Bernie

Ber-llary: Merging Hillary and Bernie
04/22/2016 07:41 am ET | Updated 3 hours ago
248

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-brodsky/ber-llary-merging-hillary_b_9756652.html

Carlo Allegri / Reuters

Hillary’s victory in New York was big and important. She reminded us of what we like about her, and actually connected with people. She effectively focused attention on what she did well as a Senator and a candidate. She put it together smartly, but there’s a “Thank you Bernie” needed as well.

Bernie’s primary campaign has saved Hillary. She’s been tested, she’s moved, she’s finally getting her legs under her, all because of Bernie and his minions. The minor hoo-hah about Bernie’s attacks will disappear. What will stay is his powerful ability to define both the politics and policies of 2016. He’s leading a movement, not just running for a job.

Bernie took the insights and the cri de couer of Occupy Wall Street and gave them structure and political stature. Sort of like what FDR did with Norman Thomas, Bella Abzug did with Betty Freidan, and Obama with Dr. King and Malcom X. It’s a traditional American dynamic and refreshes the body politic every time.

There’s a dark side to the politics of 2016 that underscores the danger that both Hillary and Bernie face. Trump is a serious threat in November. He’s not a right-wing ideologue, selling supply-side snake oil. His economic populism on trade, out-sourcing, taxing hedge funds, and maintaining Social Security and Medicare enrages the Kochs, Cruz, Fox News and the Conservative Establishment. But it resonates with voters who are focused on their economic condition. The outrageous language and ideas about immigration, punishing women, gender and orientation equality and the like are likely to drag him down in the end. But on the battlefield of the economy, he’s a tough nut to crack.

Bernie’s movement has the muscle, breadth and economic ideas to counter-punch Trump effectively. Will they?

Bernie will try, no doubt. He understands that no good can come out of baying at the moon after the convention. His foot soldiers, not so much. For the aged among us, we remember the consequences of abandoning Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 campaign against Nixon, and the Nader effect on 2000’s Bush-Gore contest. Something has to be done to avoid a third debacle.

Imagine the consequences for peace, prosperity and justice of President Trump. Even so, it will be hard to scare the Berners into supporting Hillary. The responsibility is on her by word and deed to welcome the movement into her campaign. Symbols will matter. Ideas will matter. She can’t win without the energy and votes that support Bernie.

She needs to do more than a pro forma welcome the losing camp into the fold. It’s hard to predict the mechanics of a Bernie-Hillary merger. Offering the Veep spot, keynote speeches, lots of joint campaigning are all necessary, but not sufficient. We’ll need a little magic as well.

There are Clinton camp forces that will advise her to do little, the same forces that gave us Bob Rubin and repeal of Glass-Steagall. Hillary has to figure this one out for herself and move decisively and smartly to keep the progressives together. Not easy. Possible. Necessary.
Follow Richard Brodsky on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RichardBrodsky

April 21, 2016

33 Things I Hate About This Election, in No Particular Order

33 Things I Hate About This Election, in No Particular Order

By Ijeoma Oluo / The Establishment
April 19, 2016

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/33-things-i-hate-about-election-no-particular-order

1. When Bernie supporters use “whore” in the pejorative when referring to Hillary

2. When Hillary Clinton said she keeps hot sauce in her bag

3. Marco Rubio’s suits

4. Every reference to Bernie marching with MLK

5. Hillary’s AIPAC speech

6. Donald Trump

7. Everyone who tells me it’s my duty to vote for one of these assholes

8. John Kasich’s haircut

9. Every white woman who says that it’s your feminist duty to vote for Hillary

10. Every dude who says women only vote for Hillary because she’s a woman

11. The fact that after every primary I have to hear clips of Trump’s gross speeches over and over even on fucking NPR

12. That time Hillary pretended to be your abuela

13. Every time a politician tours a poor black neighborhood like they’ve landed in a National Geographic documentary

14. Every time somebody asks Jonathan Chait what he thinks about the election

15. Every dinner party when somebody goes, “Sooo ... how about this election?” and you can’t legally stab them in the eye with a fork

16. Every former high school classmate that you didn’t know was a Trump supporter

17. Every dude who has tried to explain to me how elections work

18. Every time Carly Fiorina vividly imagined seeing video of human fetuses being torn apart

19. That time all the dudes were talking about their dick sizes

20. Every dude who has told Hillary to lower her voice

21. Every poll about which candidate is more “likable”

22. Every reader who is now adding up complaints to demand that I insult Hillary or Bernie a few more times to make this listicle fair

23. Every has-been celebrity who emerged from obscurity just to destroy our childhood with their candidate endorsement

24. Every person who has guessed at my political affiliation from a single tweet and proceeded to lecture me on why that assumed affiliation is wrong

25. Every joke every candidate has tried to make

26. Every person who says that we have to respect the beliefs of racist, hate-filled Trump followers

27. Every person who has used “illegals” in their political posts when referring to living, breathing human beings

28. Every transphobic “bathroom bill”

29. Everybody who has ever used the phrase “American values” without irony

30. Every white dude who thinks that his support of Bernie is a civil rights revolution

31. That time I felt like I had to defend Megyn Kelly

32. Every person on Twitter who thinks they can annoy you into supporting their candidate

33. Bill Clinton

Ijeoma Oluo is the Editor-At-Large of The Establishment. A Seattle-based Writer, Speaker, and Internet Yeller, her work has appeared in The Guardian, The Stranger, New York Magazine, Huffington Post, and more. She was named one of the Most Influential People in Seattle by Seattle Magazine. She's also a columnist at The Seattle Globalist.

April 9, 2016

What Will Happen When Genetically Engineered Salmon Escape Into the Wild?

What Will Happen When Genetically Engineered Salmon Escape Into the Wild?

The FDA has failed to fully examine the risks this new species of salmon would present to wild salmon.

By Brettny Hardy / AlterNet
April 8, 2016

Print
60 COMMENTS

On the Lower Stanislaus River in California's Central Valley. The chinook salmon is an anadromous fish that is the largest species in the salmon family. Chinook salmon range from San Francisco Bay in California to north of the Bering Strait in Alaska, and the waters of Canada and Russia. They are highly valued, mostly due to their relative scarcity, compared to other salmon along the Pacific Coast. Nine populations are listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act as either threatened or endangered, including the fall runs found in California's Bay-Delta. USFWS photo/Dan Cox

Photo Credit: Dan Cox/Pacific Southwest Region USFWS/Flickr CC

In late 2015, the Food and Drug Administration gave the greenlight to AquaBounty, Inc., a company poised to create, produce and market an entirely new type of salmon. By combining the genes from three different types of fish, AquaBounty has made a salmon that grows unnaturally fast, reaching adult size twice as fast as its wild relative.

Never before has a country allowed any type of genetically engineered animal to be sold as food. The United States is stepping into new terrain, opening Pandora’s box. But are we ready for the consequences?

In order to answer that question, we must first look back on how we as a nation arrived at this point. Historically, the United States has enjoyed a rich bounty of seafood from the ocean. When I lived in Alaska, I always loved the late summer months when wild salmon would fill the rivers, making their way to spawning grounds. Fresh, wild salmon filets were delicious and abundant. And they still are.
ADVERTISING

Unfortunately, outside of Alaska, our poor management of an enormous fishing industry and important habitat has depleted fish stocks all along our coasts. Salmon species, in particular, are sensitive to environmental changes. The development and industrialization of our coast has polluted and dammed the rivers they depend on to breed. Although salmon used to be abundant on both the east and west coasts, large, healthy populations of salmon now exist mostly in Alaska.

Instead of fixing the environmental problems we have created or investing in the protection and recovery of our existing wild salmon resources, some have decided to create a new, genetically engineered fish that brings a host of its own problems and further undermines the sustainability of our food supply.

The genetically engineered salmon that the FDA approved will undertake a journey that stretches halfway around the globe in order to arrive at your dinner table. AquaBounty plans to produce the salmon eggs in a lab on Prince Edward Island in Canada, fly them to Panama to be raised, slaughtered and filleted, and then bring them back to the U.S. so they can be sold to your family. How many tons of greenhouse gases are emitted during that 5,000-mile trip?

That’s a far cry from the farm-to-table experience of eating seafood caught and sold by your local fisherman. Even worse, the FDA has so far refused to require food labels, so you won’t even know if the fish you’re eating is genetically engineered.

The waste and secrecy inherent in this process is bad enough, but the environmental consequences of this decision are potentially enormous. The FDA has failed to fully examine the risks this new species of salmon may present to wild salmon—and the environment—should it escape into the wild, which even some supporters of the FDA decision acknowledge is inevitable.

Once free, these fish will enter a world where wild salmon are already in a precarious state. In this fragile environment, genetically engineered fish would compete with their wild counterparts for food and space, and could even potentially interbreed with them. They will also bring new diseases and cause changes to basic food webs and ecosystem processes that are difficult to anticipate.

Even more concerning is that the FDA does not have the expertise to properly understand the environmental devastation a release of genetically engineered fish could cause. The FDA exists to ensure that the food and drugs we consume are safe for humans, but does not typically evaluate the environmental impacts of putting new types of engineered foods into the ecosystem. The two agencies with actual biological expertise in fisheries and ocean ecosystems, the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service, were not given the chance to formally review FDA’s approval.

Congress has not created a comprehensive statutory scheme to address the management of genetically engineered products. As a result, agencies are left trying to regulate genetically engineered products under a patchwork of ill-fitting statutes that do not comprehensively address associated environmental and other risks of these new creatures.

This new breed of fish does not herald progress. Instead, it highlights the ways we have devastated many of our wild fish populations and our continuing failure to recover this once-abundant natural food source.

We are opening Pandora’s box, and we are completely unprepared for the consequences.

Editor’s note: The author is the lead attorney on a lawsuit filed in federal court by the non-profit Earthjustice to challenge the FDA’s decision to approve AquaBounty’s genetically engineered salmon. Read more about the case at Earthjustice.

Brettny Hardy works with the Oceans program in the California regional office of Earthjustice.

April 8, 2016

Bernie Sanders: Prolific Democratic Party fundraiser

Bernie Sanders: Prolific Democratic Party fundraiser
Eric Bradner

By Eric Bradner, CNN

Updated 1:15 PM ET, Mon February 8, 2016

http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/05/politics/sanders-democratic-fundraisers/index.html


What he didn't mention: The Vermont senator and presidential candidate is a prolific fundraiser himself and has regularly benefited from the Democratic Party apparatus.

In recent years, Sanders has been billed as one of the hosts for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee's retreats for the "Majority Trust" -- an elite group of top donors who give more than $30,000 per year -- at Martha's Vineyard in the summer and Palm Beach, Florida, in the winter. CNN has obtained invitations that listed Sanders as a host for at least one Majority Trust event in each year since 2011.

The retreats are typically attended by 100 or more donors who have either contributed the annual legal maximum of $33,400 to the DSCC, raised more than $100,000 for the party or both.

Sanders has based his presidential campaign on a fire-and-brimstone critique of a broken campaign finance system -- and of Hillary Clinton for her reliance on big-dollar Wall Street donors. But Sanders is part of that system, and has helped Democrats court many of the same donors.

A Democratic lobbyist and donor who has attended the retreats told CNN that about 25% of the attendees there represent the financial sector -- and that Sanders and his wife, Jane, are always present.
"At each of the events all the senators speak. And I don't recall him ever giving a speech attacking us," the donor said. "While progressive, his remarks were always in the mainstream of what you hear from senators."
Sanders' political leanings were well known by the donors who attended the retreats. "Nobody was more surprised that Bernie was there than the donors were," said another Democrat who attended the retreats.

But Sanders maintains that members of Congress now spend far too much time making calls seeking campaign contributions -- or "dialing for dollars," he said during a speech at the New England Council's "Politics and Eggs" event Friday morning.

"That's what they do. And not only should members who are elected be working for the people, not raising money -- if you think you could simply divide your brain in half, if you're working on unemployment or health care and think, now I've gotta go out and raise money, it affects your entire being," he said.

Benefits from Democratic establishment

Sanders has been an Independent while in Congress, but has caucused with the Democrats since he was elected to the Senate in 2006, helping them maintain their majority for eight years.

Michael Briggs, a Sanders spokesman, said Sanders has "raised more money for the Senate Democrats than almost any other member of the Senate Democratic caucus" because he sees helping the party regain the majority as critical.

"He has in the past written letters and helped Senate Democrats elect Democrats. He thinks that's very important to the country," Briggs said.


He got a hand from the party in 1996, when Rob Engel, then the political director for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, pushed a Democratic contender out of the race for the House seat Sanders held as an independent.
In 2006, when Sanders ran for the Senate, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee pumped $37,300 into his race and included him in fundraising efforts for the party's Senate candidates.

The party also spent $60,000 on ads for Sanders, and contributed $100,000 to the Vermont Democratic Party -- which was behind Sanders even as he ran as an independent.

Among the DSCC's top contributors that year: Goldman Sachs at $685,000, Citigroup at $326,000, Morgan Stanley at $260,000 and JPMorgan Chase & Co. at $207,000.

During that 2006 campaign, Sanders attended a fundraiser at the Cambridge, Massachusetts home of Abby Rockefeller -- a member of the same family whose wealth he had one proposed confiscating.

Two years later, when then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama was being nominated at the Democratic National Convention in 2008, Sanders was among the senators who met with Sen. Chuck Schumer's "Legacy Circle" donors who had given the legal maximum to the DSCC five years in a row or $500,000 over their lifetimes.

He paid dues to the DSCC, too, with his Progressive Voters of America political action committee cutting checks for $30,000 to the group during the 2014 election cycle.

What 'progressive' means to Hillary Clinton vs. What 'progressive' means to Bernie Sanders
Broken system?

Sanders told the "Politics and Eggs" crowd that he favors a public financing system for elections, eliminating campaign contributions entirely. But his presidential campaign, just as Clinton's and Barack Obama's in 2008 and 2012, has chosen to bypass that system, allowing Sanders to raise millions of dollars more.

He has repeatedly touted his campaign's vast online fundraising apparatus, which has pulled in 3.5 million individual contributions, averaging $27 apiece, Sanders said Friday.

Pressed by MSNBC moderator Chuck Todd on why he hasn't accepted public financing in Thursday night's debate, Sanders said the system as it exists now is "a disaster" and "very antiquated" because it limits spending in early-voting primary states.

"The way it is structured right now, if you make it all the way to California, you could do pretty well. But in terms of the early states --
Iowa, New Hampshire, the other states -- it just doesn't work," Sanders said.

April 2, 2016

Sovereign Citizen Freeman Tries Usual BS on Judge. Judge Hysterically Spews it Back