Tuesday was a very good night for Bernie Sanders. He beat Hillary Clinton in the Wisconsin primary.

That win should have been a springboard for Sanders heading into the New York primary on April 19. It wasn't.

Here's why.

First, Sanders did an interview with the editorial board of the New York Daily News. In the discussion, a transcript of which was posted on Monday, Sanders came across as the proverbial dog who caught the car. He struggled to explain (or to seemingly understand) the consequences of many of his policies and looked for all the world like someone who, in the words of Clinton, had not done his homework.

Then came Sanders's inexplicable decision to engage with Clinton on the question of who was (and was not) "qualified" to be president. Of course, Sanders was, by his recounting, simply responding to Clinton's previous questioning of his readiness for office -- which she did even if she came up short of saying the exact words.

How many times do we have to hear about polls that tell us Hillary Clinton, Gallup’s most admired woman for 20 years, is unlikable? It’s almost as though the media and pundits want to convince us Hillary is disliked so they can excuse their own spin.

Another day, another poll about how allegedly “unlikable” Hillary Clinton is.

I understand that measuring likability is a traditional part of U.S. politics, and it’s not something that was invented just for Hillary Clinton. But there’s a very particular way in which likability polling seems to be used against Hillary, in a way that it isn’t against other candidates.

Donald Trump, for example, gets poor likability ratings, but they are filtered through a media that have spent an enormous amount of time treating his disgusting campaign of bigotry and braggadocio like a summer parade down Main Street. When Trump’s low favorable ratings are mentioned, it is almost a curiosity. “He’s very unlikable—but he’s still crushing it!”

Hillary’s likability, on the other hand, is rarely discussed within the framework that she’s winning, despite leading the Democratic primary by more than two million votes. Instead, the numbers are regurgitated in a recursive loop of “conventional wisdom” that she isn’t likable.

Clinton herself pledged in January to "get to the bottom" of whether rumors of U.S. contact with extraterrestrial life were true.
In regard to Area 51, Podesta echoed Clinton's call, saying, "What I've talked to the secretary about, and what she's said now in public, is that if she's elected president, when she gets into office, she'll ask for as many records as the United States federal government has to be declassified, and I think that's a commitment that she intends to keep and that I intend to hold her to."

Bernie Sanders’s supporters are fond of the hypothesis that Democratic superdelegates, the elected leaders and party officials who currently support Hillary Clinton by a lopsided-doesn’t-even-begin-to-describe-it 469 to 31, are going to bow to the “will of the people” if Sanders ends up winning more pledged delegates than Clinton by June. There’s just one hiccup in this logic: Sanders fans seem to be conflating the pledged delegate count and the “will of the voters,” when in fact the two are far from interchangeable.

Sanders’s reliance on extremely low-turnout caucus states has meant the pledged delegate count overstates his share of votes. To date, Sanders has captured 46 percent of Democrats’ pledged delegates but just 42 percent of raw votes. So even if Sanders were to draw even in pledged delegates by June — which is extremely unlikely — Clinton could be able to persuade superdelegates to stick with her by pointing to her popular vote lead.

Sanders already has a nearly impossible task ahead of him in trying to erase Clinton’s pledged delegate lead. He’s down by 212 delegates, meaning he’d need to win 56 percent of those remaining to nose in front. He has dominated caucus states such as Idaho and Washington, but only two caucus states — Wyoming and North Dakota — remain on the calendar. What’s more, the biggest states left — New York and California — favor Clinton demographically.

Including caucus results, Clinton leads Sanders by almost 2.4 million raw votes, 9.4 million to just more than 7 million, according to The Green Papers. So then, what would would it take for Sanders to overtake Clinton in the popular vote by the end of the primaries in June?

A Bernie Sanders supporter group going by the name “redlegion” with a coinciding website is compiling a Watch List of Hillary Clinton supporters on Twitter.

Apart from its ominous surveillance of individual Twitter users, the group calls on others to submit additional names directly via its Gmail account.

Hillary Clinton supporters are referred to as “paid shills” and “anti-bernie assholes.”

The Watch List, described as a “sampling,” also devised an application to perpetually track these people, a practice that amounts to online stalking.

I’ve thrown together a quick script to convert their User IDs to ID numbers. That way, if any of these anti-bernie assholes ever change occupations (other than bashing Bernie), we can still observe them knowing full well what they’re about.

The Hillary Watch List was posted on March 12, 2016 under the following tags: “FeeltheBern,” “Watching You” and “Fuck Hillary.”

Joe Scarborough:

I tried to get Hillary Clinton four times — three or four times to say that Bernie Sanders was unqualified to be president of the United States and just like my interview with Rick Santorum, I start asking a question, I keep going being I get an answer or give up and after three or four attempts with Secretary Clinton I gave up because she was not going to say the words he is unqualified to be president of the United States.

The crowdfunding came to light in a tweet that included (“tagged”) Ben Jealous, former NAACP chair and venture capitalist who publicly endorsed Sanders in his bid for the nomination. (show twitter in link) Rubino asserts that the GoFundMe accounts are legal. However, the Lawn Signs account includes a photo of the contract signed between Park Outdoor and Progressive Believers PAC. Under campaign finance regulations, all PACs (political action committees) must be registered and submit reports to the Federal Election Commission (FEC). A search of the FEC for Keith Rubino did not return a result. Likewise a search for “Progressive Believers PAC” in the FEC Candidate and Committee Viewer found no such committee.

The rules regarding “Individual Expenditures” state the following:

While there is no limit on how much anyone may spend on an independent expenditure, the law does require persons making independent expenditures to report them and to disclose the sources of the funds they used.

The absence of the Progressive Believers PAC among fundraising entities in the FEC indicates that Rubino’s fundraising for the Sanders presidential campaign may not be legal.

Rubino uses his occupational email account at Oswego State University as his contact, which draws the public institution into political campaign funding, also contrary to FEC regulations.