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Nanjeanne
Nanjeanne's Journal
Nanjeanne's Journal
January 31, 2016
JFK On Universal Healthcare & How Behind European Countries America Is
That damn Socialist.
January 31, 2016
As a former member of Charleston City Council and a proud representative of S.C. District 111 in the state Legislature, I have dedicated my career to advancing basic principles of racial equality and economic justice for all South Carolinians.
At a time when many Americans feel voiceless in the political process, there is one candidate running for president who embodies the same values of equal opportunity and fairness that I have fought to protect. His name is Bernie Sanders.
Bernie is fighting to address the issues that matter most to African-Americans. He is a leading voice in the movement to end the failed “War on Drugs” that has crippled communities of color and has proposed the most substantive solutions of any candidate in the race to end the disastrous era of mass incarceration.
Bernie consistently affirms the importance of black lives by insisting that police forces reflect the diversity of their communities and advocating for body cameras to ensure greater officer accountability.
Bernie also understands that civil rights and economic rights are inextricably linked. As president, he would implement a living wage of $15 an hour to guarantee that no American who works 40 hours a week will be forced to live in poverty.
Instead of investing in jails and incarceration, he will invest in education and jobs for our local communities. He will enact tuition-free public colleges and universities so that every student who works hard can achieve his college dream. And he plans to create 13 million fair-paying jobs by rebuilding America’s crumbling infrastructure.
I am proud to pledge my support for a candidate who recognizes that we live in a rigged economy that is stacked against America’s working and middle class. Bernie has built his campaign around tackling income inequality and rescuing America’s disappearing middle class.
I am committed to joining him in that fight because establishment politics will not address problems that have festered for decades.
There is only one candidate in the race who will reinvigorate America’s working class and stand up to Wall Street and special interests. His name is Bernie Sanders, and I’m proud to join his political revolution.
Rep. Wendell Gilliard
House District 111
Marvin Avenue
http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20160130/PC1002/160139932/
Letter: Rep. Gilliard of SC endorses Bernie Sanders
Another State Rep in SC. Not sure if this has been posts yet.
As a former member of Charleston City Council and a proud representative of S.C. District 111 in the state Legislature, I have dedicated my career to advancing basic principles of racial equality and economic justice for all South Carolinians.
At a time when many Americans feel voiceless in the political process, there is one candidate running for president who embodies the same values of equal opportunity and fairness that I have fought to protect. His name is Bernie Sanders.
Bernie is fighting to address the issues that matter most to African-Americans. He is a leading voice in the movement to end the failed “War on Drugs” that has crippled communities of color and has proposed the most substantive solutions of any candidate in the race to end the disastrous era of mass incarceration.
Bernie consistently affirms the importance of black lives by insisting that police forces reflect the diversity of their communities and advocating for body cameras to ensure greater officer accountability.
Bernie also understands that civil rights and economic rights are inextricably linked. As president, he would implement a living wage of $15 an hour to guarantee that no American who works 40 hours a week will be forced to live in poverty.
Instead of investing in jails and incarceration, he will invest in education and jobs for our local communities. He will enact tuition-free public colleges and universities so that every student who works hard can achieve his college dream. And he plans to create 13 million fair-paying jobs by rebuilding America’s crumbling infrastructure.
I am proud to pledge my support for a candidate who recognizes that we live in a rigged economy that is stacked against America’s working and middle class. Bernie has built his campaign around tackling income inequality and rescuing America’s disappearing middle class.
I am committed to joining him in that fight because establishment politics will not address problems that have festered for decades.
There is only one candidate in the race who will reinvigorate America’s working class and stand up to Wall Street and special interests. His name is Bernie Sanders, and I’m proud to join his political revolution.
Rep. Wendell Gilliard
House District 111
Marvin Avenue
http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20160130/PC1002/160139932/
January 31, 2016
http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/hillary-bernie-math#.vyVwA6xxG
Clinton Iowa Volunteers Train When To Push Backers To O’Malley — To Block Bernie
More sneaky "tactics" from Clinton campaign. E crepes below but whole article is worth reading. FYI Clinton denounced this in 2008 when it was being done to her.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president is instructing its Iowa caucus leaders to — in certain cases — throw support to former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, with the goal blocking her main opponent, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, from securing additional delegates.
The tactical move is rooted in the complex math of the Iowa caucuses Monday night, where the campaign is looking to defeat Sanders in a state whose caucus-goers have historically backed progressive challengers.
A precinct captain, Jerome Lehtola, confirmed to BuzzFeed News that the campaign has trained precinct captains to release supporters to O’Malley if the move can make him “viable” without hurting Clinton. A Clinton aide said the campaign has trained more than 4,000 volunteer precinct captains to handle a host of different scenarios, including ones where caucus-goers are released to or recruited from another camp.
“Our precinct leadership teams have worked hard to get to know as many people in their precincts as possible and they’ll use those relationships to maximize Hillary Clinton’s delegate count depending on which groups are viable on caucus night,” the aide said.
The goal, in the caucuses’ complex terms, is to cost Clinton no delegates in the state’s 1,681 caucuses while ensuring stray O’Malley supporters don’t defect to Sanders.
This kind of tactical maneuvering is an old Iowa pattern, part of what a former Iowa aide to John Kerry in 2004, Addisu Demissie, described as being part of the state’s “brilliantly, gloriously, esoterically small-d democratic” tradition. (Demissie describes the caucus math in excruciating detail in his piece.) The Clinton and Obama campaigns played similar tactical games in 2008, and a deal between Obama’s and Bill Richardson’s campaigns was controversial enough to be kept top secret at the time. At the time, outraged Clinton aides called reporters to denounce the deal.
This time around, there is no indication that an agreement is involved.
It’s sad and telling that their campaign doesn’t think they can win without these kinds of tactics,” said Rania Batrice, Sanders’s Iowa spokesperson. “At the end of the day though, we believe in the caucus process and know it’s in the very capable hands of Iowans.”
That’s what they told us in the training sessions — I’m not sure how well it’s going to work,” said Lehtola, 69, a retired hospital worker who is a Clinton’s precinct captain in Iowa Falls, and who showed off the app’s ease of use to a BuzzFeed News reporter.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/hillary-bernie-math#.vyVwA6xxG
January 31, 2016
POLITICAL CAPITAL
Hillary Clinton Gets $13 Million From Health Industry, Now Says Single-Payer Will "Never, Ever Come To Pass"
BY DAVID SIROTA
Closing out her Iowa campaign, Hillary Clinton on Friday declared that the Medicare-for-all proposal pushed by her Democratic primary opponent and many liberal groups will “never, ever come to pass.” The statement came weeks after a new poll showed most Americans support the idea. Her declaration was a reversal of her position two decades ago — which came before she received millions of dollars of campaign cash from the health industry.
Clinton’s comments, which were made during an appearance at Grand View University in Iowa, were aimed at Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who has long championed the kind of government administered health care system used by many major industrialized nations. Of Sanders’ proposal, Clinton said on Friday: "People who have health emergencies can't wait for us to have a theoretical debate about some better idea that will never, ever come to pass." The Kaiser Family Foundation’s December 2015 tracking poll found that 58 percent of Americans support expanding Medicare to cover everyone.
Clinton's slammed the push for single-payer even though some of the major labor unions supporting her campaign have long cited that goal as a top legislative priority. Her comments also contrast with what she herself said in 1994 during remarks to the Lehman Brothers Health Corporation. As CBS News notes, back then she declared that a single-payer system was all but inevitable, saying: “I believe that by the year 2000 we will have a single payer system. I don’t think it’s — I don’t even think it’s a close call politically ... it will be such a huge popular issue in the sense of populist issue that even if it’s not successful the first time, it will eventually be.”
Between that declaration and her now saying single-payer can never pass, Clinton has vacuumed in roughly $13.2 million from sources in the health sector, according to data compiled by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. That includes $11.2 million from the sector when Clinton was a senator and $2 million from health industry sources during her 2016 presidential campaign. In a 2006 story about her relationship with the health industry, the New York Times noted that during her Senate reelection campaign, she was "receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from doctors, hospitals, drug manufacturers and insurers" and had become "the No. 2 recipient of donations from the industry."
Clinton and her daughter Chelsea have suggested that Sanders plan would dismantle the Affordable Care Act, which Sanders voted for. Sanders has disputed that and has also disputed that passing a single-payer system is impossible if a president pushes it.
In 2014, that view got a boost from then-Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin. He told the Hill newspaper that year that when it came to creating a Medicare-for-all system or a government-run health care option in the Affordable Care Act, “We had the votes in ’09. We had a huge majority in the House, we had 60 votes in the Senate.”
Democrats, however, are not expected to have such numbers in Congress after the 2016
Clinton Gets $13 Million From Health Industry, Now Says Single-Payer Will "Never, Ever Come "
POLITICAL CAPITAL
Hillary Clinton Gets $13 Million From Health Industry, Now Says Single-Payer Will "Never, Ever Come To Pass"
BY DAVID SIROTA
Closing out her Iowa campaign, Hillary Clinton on Friday declared that the Medicare-for-all proposal pushed by her Democratic primary opponent and many liberal groups will “never, ever come to pass.” The statement came weeks after a new poll showed most Americans support the idea. Her declaration was a reversal of her position two decades ago — which came before she received millions of dollars of campaign cash from the health industry.
Clinton’s comments, which were made during an appearance at Grand View University in Iowa, were aimed at Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who has long championed the kind of government administered health care system used by many major industrialized nations. Of Sanders’ proposal, Clinton said on Friday: "People who have health emergencies can't wait for us to have a theoretical debate about some better idea that will never, ever come to pass." The Kaiser Family Foundation’s December 2015 tracking poll found that 58 percent of Americans support expanding Medicare to cover everyone.
Clinton's slammed the push for single-payer even though some of the major labor unions supporting her campaign have long cited that goal as a top legislative priority. Her comments also contrast with what she herself said in 1994 during remarks to the Lehman Brothers Health Corporation. As CBS News notes, back then she declared that a single-payer system was all but inevitable, saying: “I believe that by the year 2000 we will have a single payer system. I don’t think it’s — I don’t even think it’s a close call politically ... it will be such a huge popular issue in the sense of populist issue that even if it’s not successful the first time, it will eventually be.”
Between that declaration and her now saying single-payer can never pass, Clinton has vacuumed in roughly $13.2 million from sources in the health sector, according to data compiled by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. That includes $11.2 million from the sector when Clinton was a senator and $2 million from health industry sources during her 2016 presidential campaign. In a 2006 story about her relationship with the health industry, the New York Times noted that during her Senate reelection campaign, she was "receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from doctors, hospitals, drug manufacturers and insurers" and had become "the No. 2 recipient of donations from the industry."
Clinton and her daughter Chelsea have suggested that Sanders plan would dismantle the Affordable Care Act, which Sanders voted for. Sanders has disputed that and has also disputed that passing a single-payer system is impossible if a president pushes it.
In 2014, that view got a boost from then-Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin. He told the Hill newspaper that year that when it came to creating a Medicare-for-all system or a government-run health care option in the Affordable Care Act, “We had the votes in ’09. We had a huge majority in the House, we had 60 votes in the Senate.”
Democrats, however, are not expected to have such numbers in Congress after the 2016
January 30, 2016
Edited to add link in original post - Sorry: http://www.salon.com/2016/01/30/my_day_with_bernie_sanders_and_hillary_clinton_two_iowa_rallies_explain_why_hillary_may_be_about_to_blow_a_sure_thing/
Two Iowa rallies explain why Hillary may be about to blow a Sure Thing
My Day with Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton: Two Iowa rallies explain why Hillary may be about to blow a sure thing from Salon.
By Edward McClelland
(bolding mine)
The Iowa Caucuses are the Coachella of politics. There’s nowhere else you can catch so many big names in one afternoon.
On Sunday morning, I sat in a coffee shop in Cedar Rapids, eating one of Iowa’s famous boxing-glove-sized cinnamon rolls, and scanning the Des Moines Register, which was cover-to-cover rally reviews. (“Glenn Beck Comes to Iowa to Endorse Cruz”; “Trump: I Could ‘Shoot Somebody’ and Keep Voters.”) Hillary Clinton was in Marion at 12:30, Marco Rubio in Cedar Rapids at 2, Bernie Sanders in Independence at 5:30. I decided to hit all three events.
I had woken up as an undecided voter, and I would go to sleep as one, too, but in between, I saw that Clinton and Sanders are appealing to two diametrically opposed impulses in Democratic voters. Clinton’s campaign is based on fear – fear that Republicans will return to power and undo all the progress Obama has made since 2009, just as they undid everything her husband achieved in the 1990s. Sanders, on the other hand, is running on hope – hope for what he calls a “political revolution” that will take power out of the hands of billionaires and restore it to the middle class.
When Hillary Clinton’s campaign bus arrived at Vernon Middle School, nearly an hour after her speech’s scheduled start time, the few hundred supporters in the school cafeteria gathered at the windows to see if their candidate would step out into the snow. They only saw a bomb-sniffing dog patrolling the playground. As a former first lady, Clinton is protected by the Secret Service, which is why we’d all had to pass through a metal detector to get into this room.
After an introduction by New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker – whose grandmother, he mentioned twice, grew up in Des Moines – Clinton got down to her business of scaring people with stories about Republican misrule. It was a message she took across the state, to Marion, West Des Moines and North Liberty.
You listen to the Republicans, they want to go right back to failed economic policies,” she said that day. “Honest to goodness, it’s as though evidence, facts, history, mean nothing to them. Back to what wrecked our economy in the George W. Bush administration, and they make no apologies. They want to cut taxes even more on wealthy people; they want to literally turn the clock back.”
The last time a Clinton was in the White House, she pointed out, incomes went up, and the budget was balanced. Then, a Republican president screwed it all up.
“One of the first things they did was to defang the regulators who were supposed to keep an eye on Wall Street and the financial markets,” Clinton said. “They took their eyes off the financial markets, they took their eyes off the mortgage markets, and we had the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. We lost 9 million jobs, 5 million homes, $13 trillion in family wealth.”
Clinton does have plans for her presidency: she wants to install 500 million new solar panels by the end of her first term, and supply half the country’s power with clean energy by the end of her second. She wants a Fair Share Surcharge of 4 percent on incomes over $5 million, to pay for parental leave and early childhood education. She wants to raise the minimum wage and guarantee equal pay for women. But those are incremental proposals of a candidate running to extend Democratic leadership for another four years. Her campaign is not about moving the country forward; it’s about preventing the country from slipping backward. That impulse inspired her attack on Sanders’s proposal for a single-payer health care system.
“I think we should build on the progress we’ve made,” Clinton said. Under the Affordable Care Act, “we now have 90 percent of Americans covered, and we have the chance to get the costs down, which will be my primary focus. I want to cut out-of-pocket costs and cap prescription drug costs. I don’t want to start over. I don’t want to plunge our country into another contentious debate. I feel if we’re at 90 percent coverage, that it’s a lot easier to get to 100 percent coverage and fix what needs to be fixed than to start all over again and try to go from zero to 100 percent; I just don’t think that’s achievable.”
Before taking questions, Clinton gave the microphone to her celebrity endorser: John “Bowzer” Bauman of the neo-doo-wop group Sha Na Na. Bowzer boomed the intro to the Marcels’ “Blue Moon,” and promised to flex his arms and open his mouth reeeeal wide if Hillary wins the caucus.
(At her next stop, in North Liberty, Clinton ended her “booga-booga” show by promising to stop “the onslaught of our rights: women’s rights, gay rights, civil rights, worker’s rights. We gotta stand up against what the Republicans would do. We have to defend Social Security from their continuing efforts to privatize it, hand all that money over to Wall Street.”)
North of Marion, past 40 miles of snow-covered corn and soybean fields is the pop. 6,000 village of Independence, where Sanders spoke at the Heartland Acres Agribition Center. It was a smaller town, but a bigger crowd; they stood around the edge of the exhibition hall to hear Sanders, who was five minutes late – shockingly punctual for a presidential candidate.
Even though he’s been in Washington since 1991, two years longer than Clinton, and in public office for 33 years, longer than anyone ever elected to the White House, Sanders expends a lot of verbiage trying to convince people he’s not a crank economics professor running a fringe campaign only an alternative weekly would endorse. Disclaimers are necessary when you start your speeches, “By the way, are you guys interested in a political revolution?”
Right off the bat, Sanders hit the audience with statistics: the Walton family, heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune, owns more wealth than the poorest 40 percent of Americans; Americans work the longest hours of any country on Earth; 58 percent of all new income is going to the top 1 percent; there are more Americans in prison than Chinese, even though China is “an authoritarian state four times our size.”
Yet the dour New England socialist is the sunny one in this race. Clinton looks back, and is frightened. Sanders looks ahead, and sees the America he’s been trying to build since he moved from Brooklyn to Vermont in the 1960s: an America in which new mothers and fathers will be guaranteed three months of parental leave, the minimum wage will pay $15 an hour, free college tuition will be funded by a tax on financial speculation, and every citizen will be insured by a single-payer health care system.
“What this campaign is about is transforming America,” Sanders said. “Nothing that I said to you today is utopian; nothing is radical. Nothing that I have said does not exist in other countries, and nothing I have said to you today is not wanted and supported by the American people. The American people want to raise the minimum wage, they want pay equity, they want to create jobs by building our infrastructure, they want to make colleges and universities tuition free, they want to expand Social Security, not cut Social Security. They want us to deal effectively with climate change. They want to end a corrupt campaign finance system. None of this is radical. None of it is pie in the sky, and I told you how we could pay for each of these programs. The issue is not whether the American people want it; the issue is whether or not we have the courage to take on the greed of the billionaire class, who want it all for themselves. That is what this campaign is about.”
Sanders’s kicker reminded me of a quote from Tommy Douglas, who achieved for Canada what Sanders is trying to achieve for the U.S. – a single-payer health care system: “Courage, my friends; ’tis not too late to build a better world.”
I agreed with everything Sanders said, but still have reservations about his candidacy. Not once did he mention foreign policy, where the president has the most latitude to act. A Republican Congress would reject all his economic proposals. He’d be a symbolic president, whose achievement would be moving the Overton window to the left, introducing radical ideas to public discourse, perhaps to be fulfilled by future administrations. Also, he’s from Vermont, which vies with Utah for Least Typical State. Vermont is America’s version of The Shire, the Hobbit-populated land in “The Lord of the Rings”: a green liberal Zion with no cities, no minorities and no urban problems.
Yet Sanders is running a better campaign than Clinton, because he understands that liberals are motivated by hope; fear is a conservative thing. Barack Obama understood that, too, which is why he out-hoped Clinton in 2008. Clinton is running the same campaign against Sanders she ran against Obama, right down to the “3 a.m. phone call” trope: she talked extensively about her role in plotting to kill Osama bin Laden, to demonstrate she’s ready to be commander in chief.
The latest CNN Poll of Polls shows Sanders leading Clinton in Iowa, 46 percent to 44 percent. The caucuses favor true-believing ideologues with motivated followers. Advantage: Sanders. A win in Iowa, followed by a certain victory in New Hampshire, would give Sanders the credibility to pitch himself to Southern voters. Once again, Hillary Clinton may be on the verge of blowing a sure nomination. Even if she wins, her pessimistic message would not sound appealing against Marco Rubio, who gave his Cedar Rapids audience a sunny vision of capitalism as “the only system that can make poor people richer without making rich people poorer.”
The Clinton dynasty began in a town called Hope, Arkansas. Maybe Bill needs to take Hillary back home, to remind her of the message that brought the family to Washington in the first place.
On Sunday morning, I sat in a coffee shop in Cedar Rapids, eating one of Iowa’s famous boxing-glove-sized cinnamon rolls, and scanning the Des Moines Register, which was cover-to-cover rally reviews. (“Glenn Beck Comes to Iowa to Endorse Cruz”; “Trump: I Could ‘Shoot Somebody’ and Keep Voters.”) Hillary Clinton was in Marion at 12:30, Marco Rubio in Cedar Rapids at 2, Bernie Sanders in Independence at 5:30. I decided to hit all three events.
I had woken up as an undecided voter, and I would go to sleep as one, too, but in between, I saw that Clinton and Sanders are appealing to two diametrically opposed impulses in Democratic voters. Clinton’s campaign is based on fear – fear that Republicans will return to power and undo all the progress Obama has made since 2009, just as they undid everything her husband achieved in the 1990s. Sanders, on the other hand, is running on hope – hope for what he calls a “political revolution” that will take power out of the hands of billionaires and restore it to the middle class.
When Hillary Clinton’s campaign bus arrived at Vernon Middle School, nearly an hour after her speech’s scheduled start time, the few hundred supporters in the school cafeteria gathered at the windows to see if their candidate would step out into the snow. They only saw a bomb-sniffing dog patrolling the playground. As a former first lady, Clinton is protected by the Secret Service, which is why we’d all had to pass through a metal detector to get into this room.
After an introduction by New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker – whose grandmother, he mentioned twice, grew up in Des Moines – Clinton got down to her business of scaring people with stories about Republican misrule. It was a message she took across the state, to Marion, West Des Moines and North Liberty.
You listen to the Republicans, they want to go right back to failed economic policies,” she said that day. “Honest to goodness, it’s as though evidence, facts, history, mean nothing to them. Back to what wrecked our economy in the George W. Bush administration, and they make no apologies. They want to cut taxes even more on wealthy people; they want to literally turn the clock back.”
The last time a Clinton was in the White House, she pointed out, incomes went up, and the budget was balanced. Then, a Republican president screwed it all up.
“One of the first things they did was to defang the regulators who were supposed to keep an eye on Wall Street and the financial markets,” Clinton said. “They took their eyes off the financial markets, they took their eyes off the mortgage markets, and we had the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. We lost 9 million jobs, 5 million homes, $13 trillion in family wealth.”
Clinton does have plans for her presidency: she wants to install 500 million new solar panels by the end of her first term, and supply half the country’s power with clean energy by the end of her second. She wants a Fair Share Surcharge of 4 percent on incomes over $5 million, to pay for parental leave and early childhood education. She wants to raise the minimum wage and guarantee equal pay for women. But those are incremental proposals of a candidate running to extend Democratic leadership for another four years. Her campaign is not about moving the country forward; it’s about preventing the country from slipping backward. That impulse inspired her attack on Sanders’s proposal for a single-payer health care system.
“I think we should build on the progress we’ve made,” Clinton said. Under the Affordable Care Act, “we now have 90 percent of Americans covered, and we have the chance to get the costs down, which will be my primary focus. I want to cut out-of-pocket costs and cap prescription drug costs. I don’t want to start over. I don’t want to plunge our country into another contentious debate. I feel if we’re at 90 percent coverage, that it’s a lot easier to get to 100 percent coverage and fix what needs to be fixed than to start all over again and try to go from zero to 100 percent; I just don’t think that’s achievable.”
Before taking questions, Clinton gave the microphone to her celebrity endorser: John “Bowzer” Bauman of the neo-doo-wop group Sha Na Na. Bowzer boomed the intro to the Marcels’ “Blue Moon,” and promised to flex his arms and open his mouth reeeeal wide if Hillary wins the caucus.
(At her next stop, in North Liberty, Clinton ended her “booga-booga” show by promising to stop “the onslaught of our rights: women’s rights, gay rights, civil rights, worker’s rights. We gotta stand up against what the Republicans would do. We have to defend Social Security from their continuing efforts to privatize it, hand all that money over to Wall Street.”)
North of Marion, past 40 miles of snow-covered corn and soybean fields is the pop. 6,000 village of Independence, where Sanders spoke at the Heartland Acres Agribition Center. It was a smaller town, but a bigger crowd; they stood around the edge of the exhibition hall to hear Sanders, who was five minutes late – shockingly punctual for a presidential candidate.
Even though he’s been in Washington since 1991, two years longer than Clinton, and in public office for 33 years, longer than anyone ever elected to the White House, Sanders expends a lot of verbiage trying to convince people he’s not a crank economics professor running a fringe campaign only an alternative weekly would endorse. Disclaimers are necessary when you start your speeches, “By the way, are you guys interested in a political revolution?”
Right off the bat, Sanders hit the audience with statistics: the Walton family, heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune, owns more wealth than the poorest 40 percent of Americans; Americans work the longest hours of any country on Earth; 58 percent of all new income is going to the top 1 percent; there are more Americans in prison than Chinese, even though China is “an authoritarian state four times our size.”
Yet the dour New England socialist is the sunny one in this race. Clinton looks back, and is frightened. Sanders looks ahead, and sees the America he’s been trying to build since he moved from Brooklyn to Vermont in the 1960s: an America in which new mothers and fathers will be guaranteed three months of parental leave, the minimum wage will pay $15 an hour, free college tuition will be funded by a tax on financial speculation, and every citizen will be insured by a single-payer health care system.
“What this campaign is about is transforming America,” Sanders said. “Nothing that I said to you today is utopian; nothing is radical. Nothing that I have said does not exist in other countries, and nothing I have said to you today is not wanted and supported by the American people. The American people want to raise the minimum wage, they want pay equity, they want to create jobs by building our infrastructure, they want to make colleges and universities tuition free, they want to expand Social Security, not cut Social Security. They want us to deal effectively with climate change. They want to end a corrupt campaign finance system. None of this is radical. None of it is pie in the sky, and I told you how we could pay for each of these programs. The issue is not whether the American people want it; the issue is whether or not we have the courage to take on the greed of the billionaire class, who want it all for themselves. That is what this campaign is about.”
Sanders’s kicker reminded me of a quote from Tommy Douglas, who achieved for Canada what Sanders is trying to achieve for the U.S. – a single-payer health care system: “Courage, my friends; ’tis not too late to build a better world.”
I agreed with everything Sanders said, but still have reservations about his candidacy. Not once did he mention foreign policy, where the president has the most latitude to act. A Republican Congress would reject all his economic proposals. He’d be a symbolic president, whose achievement would be moving the Overton window to the left, introducing radical ideas to public discourse, perhaps to be fulfilled by future administrations. Also, he’s from Vermont, which vies with Utah for Least Typical State. Vermont is America’s version of The Shire, the Hobbit-populated land in “The Lord of the Rings”: a green liberal Zion with no cities, no minorities and no urban problems.
Yet Sanders is running a better campaign than Clinton, because he understands that liberals are motivated by hope; fear is a conservative thing. Barack Obama understood that, too, which is why he out-hoped Clinton in 2008. Clinton is running the same campaign against Sanders she ran against Obama, right down to the “3 a.m. phone call” trope: she talked extensively about her role in plotting to kill Osama bin Laden, to demonstrate she’s ready to be commander in chief.
The latest CNN Poll of Polls shows Sanders leading Clinton in Iowa, 46 percent to 44 percent. The caucuses favor true-believing ideologues with motivated followers. Advantage: Sanders. A win in Iowa, followed by a certain victory in New Hampshire, would give Sanders the credibility to pitch himself to Southern voters. Once again, Hillary Clinton may be on the verge of blowing a sure nomination. Even if she wins, her pessimistic message would not sound appealing against Marco Rubio, who gave his Cedar Rapids audience a sunny vision of capitalism as “the only system that can make poor people richer without making rich people poorer.”
The Clinton dynasty began in a town called Hope, Arkansas. Maybe Bill needs to take Hillary back home, to remind her of the message that brought the family to Washington in the first place.
Edited to add link in original post - Sorry: http://www.salon.com/2016/01/30/my_day_with_bernie_sanders_and_hillary_clinton_two_iowa_rallies_explain_why_hillary_may_be_about_to_blow_a_sure_thing/
January 30, 2016
A Revolution is Starting NOW
In the words of Robert Kennedy
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We've got your back, Senator Sanders. Let The Revolution Start NOW.
January 30, 2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-weisbrot/paul-krugman-misunderstan_b_9116490.html
Paul Krugman Misunderstands Bernie Sanders by Mark Weisbrot, Center for Economic and Politics
A very even-handed article expressing disappointment and puzzlement over Krugman's recent writings against Bernie Sanders.
I have to say it is puzzling to see Paul Krugman supporting Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders, at least to people who read his writings. Krugman has repeatedly expressed more actual contempt for what Sanders calls "the billionaire class" than Sanders himself has, citing research showing that rich people are "less likely to exhibit empathy, less likely to respect norms and even laws, more likely to cheat, than those occupying lower rungs on the economic ladder." Krugman's positions on fiscal policy, Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, and most economic issues that he writes and cares about are considerably closer to those of Sanders than of Clinton. Most journalists covering the campaign also recognize that Sanders has pushed Clinton to adopt more progressive positions such as a surtax on incomes over $5 million; or her opposition to the Trans Pacific Partnership, which the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce just forecast will likely disappear sometime between now and her presidency if she gets there.
Furthermore, Krugman is smart enough to know that someone who gets millions of dollars from Wall Street and the plutocracy is less likely to implement policies that these donors don't like, than someone who owes them nothing.
Even on foreign policy, which Krugman does not write about that often, he is much closer to Sanders and the left of the Democratic party than he is to Clinton. Krugman was the only writer at the New York Times to point out, correctly in my view, that part of the motivation for the build-up to the Iraq war was to help the Republicans win the 2002 congressional elections. In his book, "The Conscience of a Liberal," he explains how this kind of U.S. foreign policy hurts Americans by allowing the right to move the political debate away from domestic issues in which the majority have a big stake. And yet he gives Hillary Clinton a pass for voting for the Iraq War (and defending her vote for 12 years).
As others have noted, members of Congress had access to U.S. intelligence files that contradicted the Bush administration's justifications for the war, and some of them looked at the intelligence and voted "no." Twenty-one of 50 Democratic senators voted no. This was a war that took thousands of American lives and killed about a million Iraqis, and as President Obama has noted, was responsible for the creation of ISIS. It has destabilized the Middle East into a state of permanent warfare. But Clinton has also shown by her recent bellicose speech on Iran that she is more than ready for another unnecessary war. Her foreign policy leanings are considerably to the right of many mainstream Democratic leaders, including President Obama himself and Secretary of State John Kerry.
In his latest New York Times column, Krugman argues that Sanders has a flawed analysis of American politics, and contrasts it to that of Clinton:
To oversimplify a bit -- but only, I think, a bit -- the Sanders view is that money is the root of all evil. Or more specifically, the corrupting influence of big money, of the 1 percent and the corporate elite, is the overarching source of the political ugliness we see all around us.
The Clinton view, on the other hand, seems to be that money is the root of some evil, maybe a lot of evil, but it isn't the whole story. Instead, racism, sexism and other forms of prejudice are powerful forces in their own right. This may not seem like a very big difference -- both candidates oppose prejudice, both want to reduce economic inequality. But it matters for political strategy.
I don't question Krugman's sincerity, but I think this is a serious misunderstanding of Sanders' views as compared to Clinton's. Sanders is quite intelligent and has been involved in politics for more than 40 years. He understands very well the roles of "racism, sexism, and other forms of prejudice" in American society and politics. Here is what he said Thursday on MSNBC:
I think there is not widespread understanding in the white community of what it is like to be Black in America today, especially a Black male; when we know that something like one out of four African-American males born today stand a likelihood of ending up in prison. That is a tragedy that is beyond comprehension. When we know that our jails - we have more people in jail than any other country - are disproportionately Black and Latino, that is a major crisis. When we know that the Black and white communities do marijuana at about equal rates, and yet four times more Blacks are arrested for marijuana, what does that tell you? What does it tell you that Blacks are much more likely to be stopped by police officers for traffic violations than whites? So we got some serious problems in this country with institutional racism, and a broken criminal justice system, and that will be a major priority for a Sanders administration.
I have never heard anything like this from Hillary Clinton and I doubt that we will hear something like it on the campaign trail.
I raise these points with great respect for Krugman, who has contributed more than anyone in the United States to improving the debate over some crucial economic issues, and also helped advance the political debate. I am sorry that some on the left have attacked him and his motivation. I am quite sure that he is not looking for any political gain; when more than 250,000 people signed a petition for him to be appointed Treasury Secretary, he immediately and flatly refused. He is also one of the few prominent writers on economic and political issues who has, on a number of occasions, admitted when he was mistaken, and forthrightly changed his position. I hope that he will reconsider his ideas in this case.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-weisbrot/paul-krugman-misunderstan_b_9116490.html
January 29, 2016
http://www.citizen-times.com/story/opinion/contributors/2016/01/29/guest-columnist-breaking-toward-bernie/79511050/
Jake Quinn, DNC member and Super Delegate from NC Endorses Sanders
It’s clear that Americans of all stripes are frustrated with politics as usual. Washington is gridlocked. Our economy is rigged against ordinary Americans. Politicians can be bought and sold. Something is obviously wrong.
Sen. Bernie Sanders is the only candidate in either party with a long, consistent track record of independence. He is a consensus builder who knows how Washington works. He’s not been corrupted by the power and money of politics. He’s in the race because he has the passion and vision that America needs.
And Americans are responding in record numbers.
More than a million people have donated to his campaign already, a milestone unmatched by any other first-time White House candidate. He’s had record-breaking crowds at events across the country. In Iowa alone, more than 35,000 people have attended Sanders-sponsored events.
Events throughout North Carolina have been packed with people who are passionate about getting Sanders elected. Many of the attendees had never volunteered before. They have been drawn to a Sanders campaign brimming with enthusiasm. And they are already working hard.
I am a member of the Democratic National Committee, and I believe a Democratic presidency is our best hope for fixing the problems we face. We’ve seen, however, that the president cannot do it alone. He or she will also need a Congress that works. Democrats must choose a presidential nominee that will help other Democrats get elected. We must select a nominee who will inspire people, not only to vote, but also to make phone calls and knock on doors.
Sanders is the only candidate leading a people-powered campaign to revolutionize politics. It offers a special opportunity to the Democratic Party to broaden its appeal.
We need to shake things up in the District of Columbia and Raleigh, if we want to get our nation and our state back on track. Serious changes need to be made and the time is now. Sanders has the experience, the vision and the energy to move this country and our state forward.
That’s why I am proud to endorse Sen. Bernie Sanders. I am “feeling the Bern,” and ask you to join me in helping him get elected as the next president of the United States.
http://www.citizen-times.com/story/opinion/contributors/2016/01/29/guest-columnist-breaking-toward-bernie/79511050/
January 29, 2016
Interesting article with Keith Ellison re endorsements
Thought this was interesting in what Ellison is saying about what's happening behind the scenes with the establishment Democrats and how some are now looking to see how Sanders does in Iowa and NH. Of course, I think this was before the email problem of Clinton has risen again - so we may seem even more coming to the Sanders camp than Ellison originally thought.
Sanders backer Ellison: More endorsements coming soon from Capitol Hill
BALTIMORE — One of Bernie Sanders’s few prominent supporters on Capitol Hill is promising that reinforcements are coming for the Vermont senator’s insurgent campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), one of just two Democrats in Congress to endorse Sanders, said that at least two more lawmakers were on the verge of publicly backing the 74-year-old senator and that more were waiting to see if he would actually defeat Hillary Clinton in Iowa next week or New Hampshire the following week.
“No politician wants to support a campaign, no matter how noble and good, that isn’t viable. And as Bernie demonstrates some true viability, which he’s doing now, he’ll get more support. No doubt about it,” Ellison said in an interview here Thursday, taking a break from the three-day retreat of House Democrats to Charm City to map out their own 2016 strategy.
Ellison said he and Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), the other supporter of Sanders, fielded questions and comments from colleagues throughout the retreat and in recent weeks, some with a modest level of intrigue and others with increasing interest in how he had tapped the energy of young liberal activists. Ellison spent Tuesday with Sanders in Minnesota, where he drew 15,000 supporters to St. Paul and then 6,000 to Duluth, the sort of turnouts usually associated with major hockey games in those places and not politics.
“A lot of people were, like, wow, this is pretty significant,” Ellison said of lawmaker reactions this week.
He stressed that there would not be a wholesale shift of supporters away from Clinton to Sanders, but guaranteed that two lawmakers “are inclined to come out for Bernie soon, but I’ve talked to many people who like Bernie and are complimentary.” The more success Sanders has beyond the first two states, the more he can persuade the last several dozen Democrats in Congress who have not yet indicated their support for Clinton.
According to a tally kept by The Hill, 148 of the 188 members of the House Democratic caucus are supporting Clinton, with 38 of the 46 members of the Senate caucus backing the former secretary of state.
But Sanders has touched a nerve with the most liberal activists, and Democratic leaders are treading carefully around his campaign for fear of antagonizing those voters whom they will need in the fall. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) fell off her usual script Wednesday when she dismissed portions of Sanders’s agenda, including his calls for higher taxes in order to finance a broad rewrite of health laws to essentially replace the 2010 Affordable Care Act.
“We’re not running on any platform of raising taxes,” Pelosi told reporters inside the Hyatt Regency in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor on Wednesday.
By Friday morning, at the news conference concluding the retreat, Pelosi returned to her normal posture of praising Sanders for energizing what had previously been a fairly sleepy Democratic nominating race. “I’m very proud of the way Senator Sanders has expanded the universe of young people, especially, interested in the political process,” she told reporters, focusing on his attacks on unlimited and undisclosed contributions by billionaires. “I think history will record that Bernie Sanders’s candidacy had a very wholesome effect on our political process.”
Ellison said he’s plugged in to the top level of the Sanders team, frequently talking with Jeff Weaver, the campaign manager, and Robert Becker, who is running the Iowa caucus operation. He said that he has fairly open access to the candidate.
“I can call Bernie. You wanna talk to Bernie? I can get him on the phone now, if he’s not speaking. If he’s not busy, I can talk to him,” Ellison said during the interview. [Disclosure: Despite prodding to call Sanders, Ellison declined the suggestion from The Washington Post.]
He and Grijalva are not putting on a hard sell at this point, instead letting members do most of the talking.
“There are a number who are thinking: ‘Well, you know, I like this thing, I might come in, who do I talk to, how can I be more involved, or I think Bernie needs to do this, or I can’t come out but I’m definitely open.’ So there’s that kind of conversation happening, constantly,” Ellison said.
BALTIMORE — One of Bernie Sanders’s few prominent supporters on Capitol Hill is promising that reinforcements are coming for the Vermont senator’s insurgent campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), one of just two Democrats in Congress to endorse Sanders, said that at least two more lawmakers were on the verge of publicly backing the 74-year-old senator and that more were waiting to see if he would actually defeat Hillary Clinton in Iowa next week or New Hampshire the following week.
“No politician wants to support a campaign, no matter how noble and good, that isn’t viable. And as Bernie demonstrates some true viability, which he’s doing now, he’ll get more support. No doubt about it,” Ellison said in an interview here Thursday, taking a break from the three-day retreat of House Democrats to Charm City to map out their own 2016 strategy.
Ellison said he and Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), the other supporter of Sanders, fielded questions and comments from colleagues throughout the retreat and in recent weeks, some with a modest level of intrigue and others with increasing interest in how he had tapped the energy of young liberal activists. Ellison spent Tuesday with Sanders in Minnesota, where he drew 15,000 supporters to St. Paul and then 6,000 to Duluth, the sort of turnouts usually associated with major hockey games in those places and not politics.
“A lot of people were, like, wow, this is pretty significant,” Ellison said of lawmaker reactions this week.
He stressed that there would not be a wholesale shift of supporters away from Clinton to Sanders, but guaranteed that two lawmakers “are inclined to come out for Bernie soon, but I’ve talked to many people who like Bernie and are complimentary.” The more success Sanders has beyond the first two states, the more he can persuade the last several dozen Democrats in Congress who have not yet indicated their support for Clinton.
According to a tally kept by The Hill, 148 of the 188 members of the House Democratic caucus are supporting Clinton, with 38 of the 46 members of the Senate caucus backing the former secretary of state.
But Sanders has touched a nerve with the most liberal activists, and Democratic leaders are treading carefully around his campaign for fear of antagonizing those voters whom they will need in the fall. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) fell off her usual script Wednesday when she dismissed portions of Sanders’s agenda, including his calls for higher taxes in order to finance a broad rewrite of health laws to essentially replace the 2010 Affordable Care Act.
“We’re not running on any platform of raising taxes,” Pelosi told reporters inside the Hyatt Regency in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor on Wednesday.
By Friday morning, at the news conference concluding the retreat, Pelosi returned to her normal posture of praising Sanders for energizing what had previously been a fairly sleepy Democratic nominating race. “I’m very proud of the way Senator Sanders has expanded the universe of young people, especially, interested in the political process,” she told reporters, focusing on his attacks on unlimited and undisclosed contributions by billionaires. “I think history will record that Bernie Sanders’s candidacy had a very wholesome effect on our political process.”
Ellison said he’s plugged in to the top level of the Sanders team, frequently talking with Jeff Weaver, the campaign manager, and Robert Becker, who is running the Iowa caucus operation. He said that he has fairly open access to the candidate.
“I can call Bernie. You wanna talk to Bernie? I can get him on the phone now, if he’s not speaking. If he’s not busy, I can talk to him,” Ellison said during the interview. [Disclosure: Despite prodding to call Sanders, Ellison declined the suggestion from The Washington Post.]
He and Grijalva are not putting on a hard sell at this point, instead letting members do most of the talking.
“There are a number who are thinking: ‘Well, you know, I like this thing, I might come in, who do I talk to, how can I be more involved, or I think Bernie needs to do this, or I can’t come out but I’m definitely open.’ So there’s that kind of conversation happening, constantly,” Ellison said.
January 29, 2016
Shame on her. Sanders has been a proponant of universal healthcare as a RIGHT for all people. There's no chance in hell that if Sanders is elected President he would do away with the ACA until there was something better to replace it with. This is a man who only Hillary Clinton can dare to suggest that he would do away with healthcare for a woman with brain cancer. Disgraceful. Argue what can and cannot be done. There's truth in that. But using these Republican scare tactics - I have no words. Just major disappointment.
With Time Running Out in Iowa, Clinton Throws a Hail Mary
In other words - she's lying and attempting to scare people into voting for her.
From Mother Jones: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/01/hillary-clinton-embraces-obamacare-hillarycare
Bolding mine
After her attempts to derail her rival Bernie Sanders' surging campaign by deriding his "Medicare-for-all" plan fell horribly flat, Hillary Clinton is changing tactics to try to win over voters ahead of Monday's caucuses here in Iowa, issuing a full-throated defense of Obamacare—and painting herself as its architect.
"Before it was called Obamacare, it was called Hillarycare," she told an audience at Grand View University in Des Moines on Friday. Clinton's rally at the university comes as Sanders has built a dominant lead among younger voters in the state. Clinton delivered a barnstormer on Friday in her bid to catch up among this demographic.
But much of Clinton's speech dwelled on history that many of the students in her audience are too young to remember. Clinton recalled one of her greatest successes, passing the Children's Health Care Program (CHIP) as first lady. After the Bill Clinton administration failed to pass health care reform, Clinton said, she turned to the plight of children without insurance.
Clinton recalled speaking to a man in Cleveland who couldn't find anyone to sell him insurance for his two daughters with cystic fibrosis. One insurance seller had told the man, "We don't insure burning houses."
Clinton warned her audience about the stakes for Obamacare in this election. "If they get a Republican president, the Affordable Care Act will be gone," she said. "They have promised, they have tried, it will end."
The former secretary of state said that she and Sanders "share the same goal. We want to get to universal coverage." But, she added, "I want to build on what we have achieved…He wants us to start over."
Clinton brought a woman on stage tell her family's health care story. The woman's daughter had been diagnosed with brain cancer, and her treatments were covered under the Affordable Care Act because she could stay on her mother's plan. Later, both mother and daughter, both with pre-existing conditions, could purchase health care on the exchange. Obamacare "was a great gift to our family," the woman said.
Implicit in the narrative Clinton was trying to build: Elect me, or it could go away.
"Before it was called Obamacare, it was called Hillarycare," she told an audience at Grand View University in Des Moines on Friday. Clinton's rally at the university comes as Sanders has built a dominant lead among younger voters in the state. Clinton delivered a barnstormer on Friday in her bid to catch up among this demographic.
But much of Clinton's speech dwelled on history that many of the students in her audience are too young to remember. Clinton recalled one of her greatest successes, passing the Children's Health Care Program (CHIP) as first lady. After the Bill Clinton administration failed to pass health care reform, Clinton said, she turned to the plight of children without insurance.
Clinton recalled speaking to a man in Cleveland who couldn't find anyone to sell him insurance for his two daughters with cystic fibrosis. One insurance seller had told the man, "We don't insure burning houses."
Clinton warned her audience about the stakes for Obamacare in this election. "If they get a Republican president, the Affordable Care Act will be gone," she said. "They have promised, they have tried, it will end."
The former secretary of state said that she and Sanders "share the same goal. We want to get to universal coverage." But, she added, "I want to build on what we have achieved…He wants us to start over."
Clinton brought a woman on stage tell her family's health care story. The woman's daughter had been diagnosed with brain cancer, and her treatments were covered under the Affordable Care Act because she could stay on her mother's plan. Later, both mother and daughter, both with pre-existing conditions, could purchase health care on the exchange. Obamacare "was a great gift to our family," the woman said.
Implicit in the narrative Clinton was trying to build: Elect me, or it could go away.
Shame on her. Sanders has been a proponant of universal healthcare as a RIGHT for all people. There's no chance in hell that if Sanders is elected President he would do away with the ACA until there was something better to replace it with. This is a man who only Hillary Clinton can dare to suggest that he would do away with healthcare for a woman with brain cancer. Disgraceful. Argue what can and cannot be done. There's truth in that. But using these Republican scare tactics - I have no words. Just major disappointment.
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