Until recently, Sanders has experienced the great benefit of not being taken seriously. Between the focus on the unexpectedly entertaining Republican race, and the intense scrutiny on Clinton as the overwhelming Democratic favorite, the only aspect of Sanders’ record to have drawn any attention from outside his own campaign is his ambivalence on gun regulation. What this has meant is that he has been enjoying one of the greatest gifts any politician can ask for: the ability to define himself as he wishes, without any inconvenient rebuttals.

In many ways his candidacy is deeply ironic. A senior United States senator who has held national office far longer than any other candidate in the race—25 years in Congress, including influential committee positions—has been the most successful in presenting himself as the quintessential outsider. He presents himself as not only free of responsibility for anything that happened during his tenure, but vigorous in his insistence that nothing that was done while he was there had any value in addressing the problems that he discusses. And his condemnation falls equally on Democrats and Republicans alike. When he leads his audience in the chant that Wall Street regulates Congress, he draws no distinction between Democrats who enacted crucial financial regulations like the Volcker rule, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the regulation of derivatives and the Republicans who fought all three and are now working to undermine them.

Nor does President Barack Obama escape. While he does not explicitly attack the president, nowhere in Sanders’ campaign rhetoric is there any positive assessment of his record. His listeners do not hear that the Affordable Care Act was a great advance and must be protected as he and others try to go beyond it. They don’t hear that getting the top tax rate back up to where it was before Bush lowered it meant a real increase in tax fairness.

Many congressional Democrats, myself included, feel deep resentment at this wholly negative portrayal of our efforts. First, it is a prime example of how inattention has helped Sanders until now. Commentators have made a point of noting the lack of congressional support for Cruz, legitimately drawing negative inferences from the fact that his closest colleagues are essentially rejecting him. But little notice has been taken of the fact that Sanders does scarcely better: Cruz has one House supporter as I write; Sanders has two.

Earlier this week something stunning happened on the national political scene. No, not the front page New York Times story in which the top advisors for the Bernie Sanders campaign all blamed its demise on his unwillingness to listen to their advice. That’s par for the course when a losing campaign is nearly over, and the people who ran it want to make clear to any future employers that the loss wasn’t their fault. What’s remarkable is that, days later, these same people are still somehow in charge of Bernie’s campaign. Why the hell hasn’t he fired them yet?

The inaction of Bernie Sanders on this matter raises a number of questions. Candidates on the campaign trail have wall to wall schedules and every minute is taken up, so they often rely on their advisors to put things in front of them. Is it possible his advisors have kept him so isolated from the outside world that they’ve managed to make sure he hasn’t seen the New York Times article in question? Is it possible they have shown it to him, but his trademark political obliviousness has kept him from understanding why his own people were throwing him under the bus? Or perhaps Bernie knows full well that he’s been sold out by advisors who are now trying to cover their own backsides, but he figures he’s so near the end of his sinking campaign that there would be no point in bringing in new handlers at this late date.

In any case it’s difficult to imagine the tenor inside the upper echelon of the Sanders campaign at this point. Every top advisor with even a basic understanding of election math knows that he was realistically eliminated on March 15th – but does Bernie know it? Are his advisors overspending to win mathematically meaningless small states and floating absurd superdelegate-flipping fantasies as a way of convincing Bernie he still has a chance, so he’ll keep the campaign going longer and they’ll keep getting paid? Or have they done their jobs in good faith and told him it’s over, but he wants to keep it going because he doesn’t understand electoral math?

If the televison news networks would do their jobs and have their embedded reporters in the Sanders campaign tell us what’s actually going on, we wouldn’t be forced to speculate. But because the “good guy underdog Bernie still has a chance” narrative has been too good for television ratings for any network to want to give up on it, no matter how painfully fictional of a storyline it is at this point, we get no straight answers from those journalists who are in a position to know.

I remember the exact moment when I first started loving Hillary. It was because she cared about my teeth. It was during Bill Clinton’s first term, and I was reading about the ongoing political fight over Hillarycare. The newspaper story said insurance company bigwigs were angry with Hillary because she had insisted that dental coverage be included. I don’t have the exact quote, but it was words to the effect of: “Your teeth are part of your body, aren’t they? You can’t separate them.” She pointed out that children with bad teeth couldn’t eat healthy food, or concentrate on their schoolwork. And I thought, Wow. I love her.

When you’re a member of the working poor, teeth are a big problem. Chances are, you need at least some work you can’t afford; you probably live with some pain when you eat. (In Pennsylvania, where I live, if you’re eligible for Medicaid, you can get dental work. But if you’re a member of the working poor, well, good luck.) I was in my twenties before I even knew you could get a shot of Novocaine before a filling; the free city health center only used it when they yanked a tooth. And braces? In a family of five kids, that was just a dream. Even though Hillarycare didn’t succeed, it deeply impressed me that someone in the White House actually cared about people like me. And Hillary started the national discussion that finally came to fruition after the 2008 presidential election. Obama was elected, and the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) passed by a hair. At first I thought it could have been a better plan, that it was cobbled together by competing interests. But I also knew it was just the beginning, because you can’t improve something that doesn’t exist.

Then, along with millions of others, I lost a good job during the Great Recession. I managed to pay my very expensive COBRA coverage until that option finally ran out. And that’s when I started to get frequent bouts of acute pancreatitis from gallstones. Each time I showed up in the ER, the doctors told me I needed immediate gallbladder surgery or I might die; every time I told them I had no insurance, it was no longer an emergency and they sent me home. It was still two years until Obamacare kicked in, and I resigned myself — me, this smart, talented, witty person who still intended to write the Great American Novel — to being just another anonymous statistic who died from lack of medical care. God, that was depressing.

For the third time in less than three months, the Federal Election Commission is demanding that the Bernie Sanders campaign explain an ongoing litany mystery donations which have been labeled as “excessive” and “impermissible” among other rules violations. The first time around there were hundreds of unexplained contributions. The second time around there were thousands of such violations. And now the FEC wants to know where Sanders got more than ten million dollars in mystery money from.

The Sanders campaign tried to report $3,279,505.25 in individual contributions for the reporting period. But the FEC has determined that the actual contributions were $13,745,417.64, meaning that more than ten million dollars in mystery money has been taken in by Bernie Sanders. Where did it come from? Was it legal? Is this just historically shoddy record keeping, or is it historically shady corruption? There’s no way to tell by looking at the paperwork, but it’s one or the other, and that’s why the Feds are demanding answers.

The ongoing FEC violations have received zero coverage by the biggest media outlets despite being historically egregious. The consistent violations by Sanders have raised the question of why the candidate who is talking the most about tighter campaign finance laws has been breaking the existing campaign finance rules more consistently and blatantly than anyone on record.

Bernie Sanders has been given until May 4th to respond and explain where the mystery millions in cash came from, and to prove that no laws were broken. At this point the precedent is unclear in terms of punishment or forfeiture of funds. The previous two FEC violations had response deadlines that have already passed, and we have no way of determining what the Sanders campaign’s response was to either of them – but it looks like they’ll now have to prepare to explain themselves for a third and most egregious time. More reporting from The People’s View. Read the official letter on the FEC website.

Spandan Chakrabarti April 5, 2016
This is becoming a monthly event.

For the third time this year, the Federal Election Commission has served notice to the campaign of Sen. Sanders for making a mess of their [campaign] financial house. In the last two notices, the FEC noted over-limit and potentially illegal foreign contributions to the campaign, both with warnings of an audit.

But those egregious violation seem like typographical errors compared to the newest FEC notice to the Sanders campaign. The regulators have spotted more than $10 million that snuck into Sanders' campaign coffers from with no apparent accounting as to what it came from. Ten. Million. Dollars.

Information filtered through social media on Saturday, April 2 that something was amiss at the Clark County Democratic delegate convention held in Nevada. Several days later, that something was still not entirely clear.

Other tweets showed the Bernie Sanders website and its detailed call to action, along with correct information regarding delegate attendance. A digital “invite” sent by Kramer stated that delegates did not need to show up. It is this crucial piece of misinformation that led to a higher attendance of Bernie supporters and the change in delegate count, which favored Sanders.


The juxtaposition between Kramer’s email and the call to action on the Sanders’ website support Clinton’s case:

1. The Sanders’ campaign had the correct instructions regarding attendance of delegates.

2. The Sanders’ campaign was planning to mass individuals to take the place of any no-show Clinton delegates.
Lastly, a tweet from a Sanders supporter praises the overwhelming show of “new” Bernie delegates, per the website instructions. Kudos is given to the Reditt group, which links its involvement in the Clark County action.

As we explained, the NYT article is peppered with concessions that Bernie has, indeed, gone negative—but it is this paragraph that contains a stunning admission about his own view of his 2016 strategy:

Mr. Sanders’s advisers urged him to challenge Mrs. Clinton over accepting $675,000 from Goldman Sachs for delivering three speeches, according to two Sanders advisers. Mr. Sanders, hunched over a U-shaped conference table, rejected it as a personal attack on Mrs. Clinton’s income — the sort of character assault he has long opposed. She has the right to make money, he offered.
Let that sink in.

Bernie Sanders, according to the New York Times, agrees with what we’ve been saying for months: His Wall Street dog whistle is a direct assault on Hillary’s integrity.

So when he insinuates that she is not trustworthy to the Daily News and then pretends it isn’t a character attack, he is being disingenuous — to be charitable.

Bernie is not alone of course. His campaign and surrogates are out there blasting away at Hillary and her endorsers, even when those endorsers are civil rights heroes.


And now we have this cheap shot from Jeff Weaver:

"I'm not so confident about that." Jeff Weaver on whether Bernie's young supporters would come out for Hillary.

@AlanKestrel750
#ImWithHer | I'm a white male Millennial who early voted for Hillary Clinton in Ohio after campaigning for Bernie Sanders for months. Ask me why.

But that wasn't the worst part. Because, when you run on a platform of political purity your followers expect you to maintain that purity through thick and thin. Unfortunately for Sanders, his seeming indifference to release his tax returns has opened up a whole Pandora's box for the online community trying to see what, if anything, Sanders may be hiding. People have been flocking to Sanders' OpenSecrets.org page, a website devoted to tracking political candidates and their personal finances as well as their campaign contributions.

According to the site, Sanders' assets are heavily invested in Wall Street corporations including big banks and big pharma and even has holdings in Diamondback Energy, an energy company out of Texas that rakes in the money through the process of fracking.

Oops.

Of course, anybody with significant assets has a variety of financial holdings that they may or may not be aware of. And nobody is implying that Bernie Sanders is supporting fracking or Wall Street simply because he has stock in certain companies, just like millions of Americans who participate in the stock market and don't let their investments dictate how they live their lives. However, the main issue here is that Bernie Sanders proclaimed himself to be a paradigm of virtue, and thus, he should now be called on his glaring hypocrisy. He may think that the business model of Wall Street is "fraud" as he said in a November debate but he also has to look himself in the mirror and realize that like millions of Americans, he actually relies on Wall Street investments to help support himself and his family. Wall Street may have some corrupt individuals in certain sectors, but as a whole it can even help a typical American, even one who believes the entire industry to be inherently evil.

Here’s why the party may regret trading a dangerous demagogue who will say anything to win for a dangerous demagogue who actually believes the terrible things he says.

1. Cruz would be the most fervently anti-abortion rights candidate the GOP has ever nominated.
Only about 1 in 5 Americans agree with Cruz that abortion should not be legal even in cases of rape or incest. We have no idea how many people support his belief that, as president, he could immediately ban abortion using the 14th amendment, because it’s so extreme that it’s never been polled.
2. Cruz may be willing to get rid of background checks.
Between 8 or 9 out of 10 Americans want to expand background checks to include all gun sales. Ted Cruz has signaled he’d get rid of all background checks anywhere they exist, touting the support of the far-right Gun Owners of America, a group “affiliated with white supremacists and the country’s anti-government militia movement” that wants to end all background checks on firearms purchases.
3. Cruz is for mass deportations and is trying to out-anti-immigrant Trump.
Would Cruz order mass deportations of the 11 million undocumented people in America? Of course, he would. Even if the person in question had simply overstayed a visa and had kids in the U.S.? “You better believe” it, Cruz told Fox News. Just as former Republican governor of California Pete Wilson scarred that state’s Republican Party forever, Cruz would become the face of mass deportations just four years after Mitt Romney lost the presidency advocating for self-deportation. Cruz’s stance on this, like most of his beliefs, has been drowned out by Trump’s, but as soon as he becomes the nominee, you won’t be able to escape it.
4. Cruz wants to raise taxes on seniors to cut them for the rich.
You could argue that all of the aforementioned issues just make Cruz a very conservative Republican, but he’s even terrible for the party when it comes to its core issue — taxes. The GOP has learned that you can effectively cut taxes for the rich, the party’s raison d’etre, as long as you cut them for everyone else. Cruz wants to do the opposite. “In an era when no politician of either party wants to cut retirement benefits for current seniors or raise taxes on the middle class, Cruz has quietly stumbled into proposing a gigantic tax increase on middle-class retirees,” Vox‘s Matt Yglesias explained. Cruz’s 19 percent sales tax would give trillions to the wealthy and raise taxes on the most vulnerable.
5. Trump can be laughed off as a fluke; Cruz could define the party forever.
“While everyone is focusing on the collapse of Trump’s popularity, no one has really noticed that Cruz’s numbers are plummeting too,” Salon‘s Simon Maloy wrote. “The same Washington Post poll that gave Trump crazily high negatives also found that Cruz is deeply underwater. His favorable rating is just 35 percent, while his unfavorable rating is 51 percent.” And that’s before Cruz is attacked for his tax plan or any of the other issues that would make him wildly unpopular with swing voters. Hilary Clinton has comparable unfavorables but has suffered decades of the Republicans’ best-funded and most vicious attacks. From shutting down the government, pandering to Donald Trump, and then wandering into the buzz saw of Trump’s attacks against him, Cruz’s popularity numbers are entirely earned. Combine his extreme views with his singular ability to make strangers nauseous and you have a devastating combination. Trump’s charm has kept him on television for decades; Cruz was the first politician able to refute charges of infidelity simply by reminding people who he is. And while Trump will certainly say horrible things that every other Republican will be forced to explain away, could they possibly be worse than what we can expect from Cruz’s father, who is sure that God sent his son to save America from gay marriage?

A documentary that Donald Trump, the Republican frontrunner, killed 25 years ago with threats of litigation is now available for all to view on the Internet.

Trump: What’s The Deal? paints a powerful and disturbing picture of a financial Dorian Gray whose public image bears little resemblance to his conduct away from the cameras, including hiring actors for $50 each to applaud at his campaign announcement.

In public, Trump presents himself as a businessman so skilled his deals are an art form. The 80-minute documentary peels back this façade. Hidden from public view, the documentary shows Trump manipulating politicians and the criminal justice system, pocketing millions in taxpayer welfare, not paying people he hired, doing some of his biggest deals with mobsters, retaining a cocaine dealer as his helicopter pilot, and evidently benefiting from having his sister working in the Justice Department before winning appointment as a federal judge. Former advisors and employees describe furious tirades that no one, not even his family, could escape.

The film reveals how Trump repeatedly engaged in questionable conduct — such as intimidating tenants of a Manhattan building he wanted to empty — but drew little attention from law enforcement. One top city official says on camera that Mayor Abe Beame, a childhood pal of Trump’s father Fred, instructed him that Donald Trump was to get whatever he wanted from city government.

The documentary also delves into Trump family values — a matter presumably of deep interest to conservative Republicans, many of whom tell pollsters they want the casino mogul to be America’s next president.