November 22, 2015

Miami Herald: "Six reasons Ted Cruz is in trouble"

link; excerpt:

1. The entire GOP is in agreement on stopping or halting the Syrian refugee program. ... Cruz is pouring gasoline on the issue, but it is not an issue on which he can distinguish himself from the field.

2. His national-security record is highly problematic. ... For many of those who care deeply about the existential threat to the West, he seems bizarrely off-base.

3. Donald Trump has a better “strong man” persona. ... The “Trump isn’t fading” problem is a bigger concern for Cruz than for the “establishment,” which is certain to rally around the final non-Trump candidate.

4. Rubio has the ability to put Cruz on defense. ... Rubio ... is a much more formidable opponent for Cruz than Jeb Bush would have been.

5. Cruz has minuscule support outside the tea party. ... His refusal to expand his appeal relegates him to one quadrant of the party, one in which he must compete with Trump and Ben Carson.

6. Iowa is becoming a must-win for him. ... Cruz says he has the money and organization to prevail in the so-called SEC primary, but former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani learned the hard way that you cannot lose repeatedly and pin your hopes on later primaries.

November 22, 2015

Salon: "America has never recovered from Ronald Reagan. That’s why Bernie Sanders is so important."

Excerpt from the great Salon article "America has never recovered from Ronald Reagan. That’s why Bernie Sanders is so important":

On Thursday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) gave his long planned speech on Democratic Socialism, invoking great American leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and reminding everyone that some of the most popular social programs we have today — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid — were all once labeled socialist and aggressively opposed by monied interests, who FDR called “economic royalists.”

Not only were social programs opposed and called socialism; so were any kind of laws or regulations that intervened with the “free market” for the betterment of society. “Unemployment insurance, abolishing child labor, the 40-hour work week, collective bargaining, strong banking regulations, deposit insurance, and job programs that put millions of people to work were all described, in one way or another, as ‘socialist,’” explained Sanders.
...
Bernie Sanders, FDR, MLK, and many other past and present Americans have a very different view of freedom, and believe that the freedom to starve or to be left untreated after being seriously injured is no freedom at all. As FDR said while listing his Second Bill of Rights, “we have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.” ...For Sanders and other Democratic Socialists (or Social Democrats), socialism is not so much about having the individual freedom to do what you wish without ever taking on a role (a major flaw in Marx’s thought was his dismissal of identity and the fulfillment human beings find in roles, e.g. someone who writes or paints would like be known as a writer or a painter), but having the freedom to fully utilize your innate talents and pursue work that you love, without having to worry about medical care or being tens of thousands dollars in debt for a necessary education. It is the right for every single person who works hard, regardless of how skilled or unskilled the labor is, to have a livable wage. And of course, it is democracy, or as Sanders put it:

“Democratic socialism, to me, does not just mean that we must create a nation of economic and social justice. It also means that we must create a vibrant democracy based on the principle of one person one vote.”

November 21, 2015

Sanders touts plan to make ‘ultra-rich pay their fair share’

Source: The Hill

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is launching an ad campaign with renewed focus on his economic policies.

Television ads set to run in early-voting states come amid the campaign’s plan to destigmatize the Democratic presidential candidate’s status as a democratic socialist.

“If you’re doing everything right but find it harder and harder to get by, you’re not alone,” Sanders says in an ad titled “Works for Us All” that will air in Iowa and New Hampshire.

“While our people work longer hours for lower wages, almost all new income goes to the top one percent,” he continues. “My plan: Make Wall Street banks and the ultra-rich pay their fair share of taxes.” ... In another spot titled “A Rigged Economy,” Sanders says America’s finances are “held in place by corrupt politics where Wall Street banks and billionaires buy elections.”



Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/dem-primaries/261015-sanders-touts-plan-to-make-ultra-rich-pay-their-fair-share

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WOW!

November 21, 2015

Sanders: 'We need to end prisons for profit’

Source: The Hill

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is calling on America to push corporate power out of its prison system.

“We need to end prisons for profit,” he said at the 2015 Presidential Justice Forum at Allen University in Columbia, S.C.

“It is wrong for corporations to be making profits from the incarcerations of their fellow Americans,” Sanders continued.
“I want to see incentives to get people out of jail or prevent people from going into jail,” the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate added.

“By and large, we do a pretty bad job in making sure that when people are released from jail, they don’t end up in jail again. There needs to be a path back from prison.”

Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/261025-sanders-we-need-to-end-prisons-for-profit

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He. Is. On. Fire!

November 21, 2015

Sanders: 'To hell with the fossil fuel industry’

Source: The Hill

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Saturday called for Republicans to abandon the corrupting influence of the Koch brothers and other wealthy energy magnates.

“This is a party that rejects science and refuses to understand that climate change is real,” he said of GOP during the annual Blue Jamboree in North Charleston, S.C.

“I understand if you stand up to the Koch brothers and the fossil fuel industry, that you’ll lose your campaign contributions,” the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate added.
“{Climate change} is already causing devastating problems all over this world. To hell with the fossil fuel industry. Worry more about your children and your grandchildren than your campaign contributions.”



Read more: http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/261019-sanders-to-hell-with-the-fossil-fuel-industry

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I love this man

November 21, 2015

George RR Martin (Game of Thrones author) on "My Position On the Syrian Refugees"

link; excerpt:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

Those words, of course, are by Emma Lazarus. Her poem, "The New Colossus," appears in bronze on the base of the Statue of Liberty. A statue given to the United States by France, our nation's oldest friend and ally... a bit of history that seems especially important just now, in light of the recent horrors in Paris....

Emma Lazarus had it right. Donald Trump and thirty-one governors have it wrong, wrong, wrong.

November 21, 2015

More Critical Newer New Hampshire State Poll - Sanders 45%, Clinton 44%

The Hill: "Sanders ahead of Clinton in New Hampshire poll":

Sanders garners 45 percent support, to 44 percent for Clinton. ... Sanders has a much more comfortable lead among young people in the Granite State poll, carrying the under-45 vote with 59 percent, to 30 percent for Clinton.

?

November 21, 2015

Shame on Henry Cuellar, Lloyd Doggett, Gene Green, Marc Veasey, and Fil Vela.

Frankly, no one should be surprised to see Henry Cuellar or Fil Vela on this list of shameful Democrats crossing party lines to support the xenophobic anti-refugees, but reading Lloyd Doggett's name on this list is heartbreaking.

November 20, 2015

The New Yorker: "Bernie Sanders’s New Deal Socialism"

Interesting article! Here's an excerpt:

Speaking on his political philosophy at Georgetown yesterday, the Vermont senator and Democratic Presidential candidate opened with a long invocation of Franklin Roosevelt and the social protections that the New Deal created: minimum wages, retirement benefits, banking regulation, the forty-hour workweek. Roosevelt’s opponents attacked all these good things as “socialism,” Sanders reminded his listeners.... “Let me define for you, simply and straightforwardly, what democratic socialism means to me,” Sanders said. “It builds on what Franklin Delano Roosevelt said when he fought for guaranteed economic rights for all Americans.”


This isn’t the first time Sanders has defined his position from the right flank of history. Pressed in the most recent Democratic debate to say how high he would take the marginal income tax, Sanders answered that it would be less than the ninety (actually ninety-two) per-cent level under the Eisenhower Administration. He added, to cheers and laughter, “I’m not that much of a socialist compared to Eisenhower.”... Bernie Sanders’s socialism is Eisenhower’s and F.D.R.’s world if Reagan had never happened: economic security updated by the continuing revolutions in gender, cultural pluralism, and the struggle for racial justice. In a word, Denmark... The mid-century political settlement between government and markets that Eisenhower took for granted never really had a name. ... “Welfare capitalism,” which is a pretty accurate name for a market system that redistributes for common benefit, sounds like the worst of both worlds. “Socialism” is historically inaccurate, and using it to name Eisenhower-era welfarism may come at the cost of further burying its other, more radical meanings. But some of the term’s appeal, as a name for Sanders’s program, is that it sounds more radical than it is. ... In this way, Sanders’s use of the word harkens back to pre-Soviet, even pre-Marxist socialism. Then the term named a clutch of objections to industrial capitalism: the physical toll of the jobs, the equal and opposite toll of unemployment and economic crisis, widespread poverty and insecurity in a world where some lived in almost miraculous luxury. ... Eisenhower’s world lacked a name for its settlement between government and markets partly because that settlement was the new normal, and the normal doesn’t need a name. Mature capitalism was supposed to produce only a moderate level of inequality. A strong government, staffed by public-minded experts, would iron out economic wrinkles. The remaining problems for reformers were remedial: bringing in previously excluded populations, especially African-Americans and isolated Appalachians. For those already on the inside, the challenges were those of what the liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith called “the affluent society”: how to want less, enjoy life more, and help build a post-materialist paradise of humanism. It is no coincidence that L.B.J., who supported the civil-rights movement and launched the War on Poverty, also promoted the National Endowment for the Humanities to enrich the lives of those whose historical labors were over. He described his Great Society program as seeking an economy that satisfied “the desire for beauty and the hunger for community,” where “the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.”

That is the lost world to which Sanders’s “socialism” points back. The return of the label, though, doesn’t mean that anyone knows how to get more radical than tacking toward Scandinavian social democracy, with its socialized health care and higher education and generous family leave. Sanders isn’t much of a socialist compared to F.D.R., either. At the heart of Roosevelt’s program was the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which greatly strengthened the hand of unions, essential parts of every welfare-capitalist order in the twentieth century, from Scandinavia to Canada. Sanders, astonishingly, didn’t once mention unions in his Georgetown speech. Roosevelt proposed a maximum income of twenty-five thousand dollars (the equivalent of about four hundred thousand dollars today), which we won’t be hearing from Sanders. Sander’s socialism is a national living wage, free higher education, increased taxes on the wealthy, campaign-finance reform, and strong environmental and racial-justice policies.... The heart of Sanders’s program, like F.D.R.’s, is economic security: like F.D.R., he argues that “true freedom does not occur” without it. In the same way, he sees a strong government as protecting individualism from an economy that bats people around like the gods in Greek dramas. Calling this once mainstream idea socialism is a way of saying how far it feels from where we find ourselves now, how radical a step it would be to get back to it.

November 20, 2015

Bernie Sanders Reaches New High in Support: Poll

Source: NBC News





Read more: http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/poll-hillary-clinton-holds-steady-support-among-democrats-n466641

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I'm not someone who puts much faith in nationwide polling in a primary race, especially when the first votes to be cast are still months away, but I'm glad to see steady progress.