Bernie Sanders, a disappointment

I am disappointed. The one candidate who has, until recently, been able to take the high ground has finally crawled into the gutter. I’m talking to you Bernie Sanders. I thought you were better than this. I was wrong.

When you started your campaign, you assured us you wouldn’t go negative. When the media latched onto the fiction created by the Republican controlled House committee investigating Benghazi about Hillary’s emails, you had the courage to tell the world “enough.” In sum, you assured us you’d stick to the issues. I thought you were better than this. I was wrong.

Quite frankly, your behavior reminds me of the antics we’ve seen over an over again from the Republican front-runner. No, you haven’t incited riot and physical violence. No, you haven’t said racist, misogynistic things. But you have been campaigning mostly by boasting about your poll numbers, your previous wins and the money you’ve raised.

You’ve been traipsing around the country, telling us what’s wrong about our government, but have said little, if anything about how you’ll address those problems. And when you’ve been pressed on the details, you’ve been unable to articulate a coherent response.

And, most recently, you accused your Democratic challenger of saying something she never said. You then followed that up by telling the world that the person with the most experience of any competitor, Democrat or Republican, lacks the qualifications to be president. You’re doing exactly what the Republican front runner has been doing for months. I thought you were better than this. I was wrong.

It’s going to be a stretch for you to get the nomination. If you don’t get it, which the odds at this point suggest, the Democratic Party will need to be consolidated. You have said that you would support whoever wins the nomination. How exactly do you plan on getting your supporters to back Hillary Clinton if you are maligning her character? I heard what she said with my own ears. She took care to not disparage you. I cannot believe you failed to take the same care.

I thought you were better than this. I was wrong.

MARK COEL

South Burlington

This map shows every place in the US that has ever had a woman in Congress
Vermont, Delaware, and Mississippi have never elected a congresswoman.
Updated by Soo Oh on April 21, 2016, 8:40 a.m. ET soo@vox.com

Nearly one hundred years after the first woman was elected to Congress, three states have never had either a woman senator or representative:

There have been questions sporadically raised about Old Towne Media LLC(OTM), presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ primary ad-buying agency.
As of the most recent filing month, Sanders’ campaign committee, Bernie 2016, has purchased a total of $44,428,881.00 through OTM, and after what will likely be massive disbursements this month, that number will rise dramatically.
It is not unusual for a candidate to purchase their ads through an ad agency. In fact, this is standard practice — fellow contender Hillary Clinton utilizes ad giant GMMB.

What is unusual is that no one seems to know who Old Towne Media is and how a totally unknown firm came into possession of the most lucrative account in presidential politics. They have, almost overnight, become, per opensecrets.org, one of the largest vendors this cycle.

(A note on LLCs: they are perfectly legal business entities, and are often used as passthrough entities that are not subject to taxation like corporations would be.)
So, Who Exactly is Behind Old Towne Media, LLC?

It’s easy to think America has changed a lot since Hillary Rodham Clinton was chastised in the early ’90s for her ambition as First Lady—refusing to sit at home and make cookies. But our conception of a presidential spouse hasn’t evolved much. Michelle Obama, a Princeton graduate and legal hotshot who was once her husband’s law-school-era mentor, has been mainly confined to dealing with soft issues: childhood obesity, planting vegetables. Rather than Hillary or Michelle, it was Laura Bush—a teacher who supported her husband’s turning from bottle to Bible—who seemed most suited to Middle America’s idea (or at least a man’s idea) of a First Lady. Of course, the paragon of them all is still Jackie Kennedy, endlessly glamorous and endlessly tolerant of her husband’s philandering.


Melania is as fastidious a wife as she is a mother, which Donald appreciates. Things come easy with her. “I work very hard from early in the morning till late in the evening,” Donald told Larry King in 2005. “I don’t want to go home and work at a relationship.” To the twice-divorced Donald, Melania is terrific. He’s never heard her fart or make doodie, as he once told Howard Stern. (Melania has said the key to the success of her marriage is separate bathrooms.) He can trust her to take her birth control every day, he boasted to Stern; she’s just amazing that way. She has the perfect proportions—five feet eleven, 125 pounds—and great boobs, which is no trivial matter. Stern once asked Trump what he would do if Melania were in a terrible car accident, God forbid, and lost the use of her left arm, developed an oozing red splotch near her eye, and mangled her left foot. Would Donald stay with her?


“How do the breasts look?” Trump asked.


“The breasts are okay,” Stern replied. Then, yeah, of course Trump stays. “Because that’s important.” There are other pluses. He appreciates Melania’s restraint when it comes to Shopping While Trump. “She’s never taken advantage of that situation, okay, as many women would have, frankly,” he has said. (“I prefer quality over quantity,” Melania tells me.) Donald does his part to make things work, too. “He is a very understanding husband,” Melania once told an interviewer. “If I say, ‘I need an hour, I’m going to take a bath,’ or I’m having a massage, he doesn’t have nothing against it. He’s very supportive in that way.” She lets him have his space; she’s not “needy” or “nagging,” as she tells me.


As for passions beyond the familial, there are a few. Melania dabbles in design. Her line of affordable gem-spangled jewelry and watches, launched on QVC, reportedly sold out in 45 minutes during its initial broadcast. (Melania’s caviar-infused anti-aging creams haven’t sold as well, though a federal judge ruled in her favor in a lawsuit she filed against its promoters.)

There’s a variant on the “Too Big to Fail” meme. It’s called “Too Big to Open.” If you try to view the April 2016 campaign fund-raising report for Bernie 2016, you’ll see this:

ORACLE error– ORA-00257: archiver error. Connect internal only, until freed. :

Originally filed on 20 April, and labeled as a “Quarterly” report, this is a whopping 312,982 pages. This report was still being processed by the FEC (and not accessible) when the committee submitted an Amended version two days later.

Attempts to open the Amended report also produce an error message from the FEC:

What Should Be in the April Report and April Quarterly Report

The April Quarterly should contain details of all campaign finance for January, February and March 2016. The single report for April should contain a breakdown of all activity during 1 March – 31 March 2016.

However because of previous RFAIs (Request for Additional Information) by the FEC, the monthly and the quarterly reports will also include corrected data for at least one prior month possibly more.


Summary of April 2016 Report
The summary page for the April report does yield some info for the period.

Total Contributions: $44,746,787
Total Disbursements: $45,715,173
Beginning Cash-on-Hand: $17,211,636
Ending Cash-on-Hand: $17,460,961

Senator Elizabeth Warren says Donald Trump’s latest critique of Hillary Clinton shows his weakness — not to mention his sexism.

“Donald Trump clearly feels threatened by Secretary Clinton’s qualifications to be president so he’s attacking Hillary Clinton for being a woman,” Warren said in a telephone interview with the Globe. “That’s what weak men do. It is an old story, and I don’t think the American voters will fall for it.”

It’s over! The lawsuit never made much sense for a major national campaign against its political party acting as data vendor, and now it has been voluntarily dismissed from court. The case cannot be refiled as the dismissal was with prejudice, and both sides will bear their own costs.

The DNC was scheduled to submit its answer to Bernie 2016’s complaint if the lawsuit had remained alive through today. The case was originally filed on December 18, 2015, but through the Campaign first delaying formal service of the suit and then both sides agreeing to an extension on April 7, essentially nothing had happened in court up to today.

The case was moot from the date of filing, as news reports indicated that both sides had come to full agreement at that time on the matters of data access and follow up investigation. There is no information here about follow up. The full text of the dismissal notice is as follows.

NOTICE OF VOLUNTARY DISMISSAL WITH PREJUDICE Pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 41(a)(1)(A), Plaintiff Bernie 2016, Inc., by and through its undersigned counsel, hereby gives notice that this action shall be DISMISSED WITH PREJUDICE, as settled, with each party to bear its own costs.

And here is the new entry on the docket.

Date Filed # Docket Text
04/07/2016 9 NOTICE of Appearance by Robert Felix Bauer on behalf of DNC SERVICES CORPORATION (Bauer, Robert) (Entered: 04/07/2016)
04/07/2016 10 Consent MOTION for Extension of Time to File Answer re 1 Complaint, by DNC SERVICES CORPORATION (Attachments: # 1 Text of Proposed Order)(Frost, Elisabeth) (Entered: 04/07/2016)
04/29/2016 11 NOTICE of Voluntary Dismissal by BERNIE 2016, INC. (Griffin, Sean) (Entered: 04/29/2016)

Friday, Apr 29, 2016 · 5:46:10 PM EDT · swiffy

News stories are picking this up. The Sanders campaign is making the case that this whole process has exonerated its actions, while statements from the DNC show the audit backed up the information from December about unauthorized access, including one instance of exporting the data.

Dear democratic socialists, political revolutionaries, Bern-feelers at large: We need to have a talk.

Let me begin by saying that I bear no ill will towards Mr. Sanders. Nothing that follows should be misconstrued as an attack on his policies, his track record, his electability in November or his character. I’m not a corporate media crony, or a plant from a pro-Hillary Clinton super PAC. I’m just a guy who believes in the predictive power of cold, hard data.

And the unsexy truth is that, barring some catastrophic news event, Sanders will not win the Democratic nomination for president in 2016. In fact, most past candidates in Sanders’s position dropped out long before this point in the race, and those who stayed in made little pretense of winning. (The Sanders campaign, which announced Wednesday it was laying off a ton of staff, may be recognizing this.)

Historically speaking, Democratic primary races do not have many twists and turns. Rather, the eventual winner tends to take an early lead — on or before Super Tuesday — and stay there. Runner-ups can kick for a while, but they tend to concede the race by February or early March.

As it stands, Sanders is firmly in runner-up territory. He is losing 9 million to 12 million among those who have already voted, and polls show him lagging by an average of 8.8 percentage points in the states yet to vote1. Sanders has gained substantially in national polls but is still the less popular candidate (outside of the Bernietopia that is social media2).