Despite his initial success, Sanders faces enormous barriers in his bid for the White House.

With the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary looming just ahead, it seems like a good time to turn from my regular European beat to the situation at home in the United States. The Republican contest is too appalling to contemplate, but on the Democratic side the race between heir-apparent Hillary Clinton and insurgent challenger Bernie Sanders has everyone riveted and quite a few excited. Who would have thought that a self-described socialist from Vermont would give the former first lady, former senator, and former secretary of state a run for her money?

With hindsight, of course, everyone has a theory about why a Sanders surge was inevitable. Wall Street has recovered from the Great Recession, but Main Street hasn’t. People are tired of the Clintons and their real or alleged abuses over three decades. Progressives are deeply disappointed with the Obama administration and this time want to elect an authentic radical. Of course nothing will get done because Congress will remain in Republican hands, but putting a genuine lefty in the White House will “send a message,” Sanders supporters say, and help build a popular movement that will gradually shift our political discourse to the left up and down the ticket and across the land.

I have a theory of my own. It goes like this. The deepest division in politics is between those who think you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs and those who believe politicking is akin to sausage-making and therefore ought to be entrusted to, or fobbed off on, people who know how sausage is made and are willing to do what it takes. (And by the way, although the old saw about omelets is sometimes attributed to Lenin, in reality it was first uttered in French—on ne saurait faire une omelette sans casser des oeufs—by François de Charette, who was not a revolutionary at all but a counterrevolutionary justifying the devastation he left in his wake.)

Read the rest of this article at TheAmericanProspect.

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Voters Skeptical That 2016 Candidates Would Make Good Presidents

Highly polarized reactions to Trump, Clinton becoming president

The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted Jan. 7-14 among 2,009 adults, including 1,525 registered voters, finds that 35% of voters say that Hillary Clinton would make either a good or great president, with 11% saying she would be great. More voters (44%) say Clinton would be either poor or terrible in the White House; 28% say she would be terrible. About one-in-five (18%) think Clinton would make an average president.

Read the rest of this report at PewResearch

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Clinton Steps Up Attacks On Sanders Days Before Iowa

We’re just getting started.

INDIANOLA, Iowa (AP) — With days to go before the lead-off Iowa caucuses, Hillary Clinton on Thursday ramped up her attacks on fellow Democrat Bernie Sanders, saying she is not interested in ideas that will “never make it in the real world.”

The former secretary of state offered a sharp assessment of the Vermont senator’s proposal for a single-payer health care system on Thursday morning, saying it would lead to “gridlock” in Washington. She also questioned his foreign policy ideas.

Clinton took up the foreign policy attack in her 30-minute speech Thursday, criticizing Sanders’ suggestion to invite Iranian troops into Syria to help fight ISIS, which she said was like “asking the arsonist to be the fire fighter.”

“Sen. Sanders doesn’t talk very much about foreign policy. But when he does it raises concerns because sometimes it can sound like he hasn’t really thought it through,” Clinton said, in Indianola.

Read the rest of this article on HuffPo.com

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Conservatives and Libertarians Should Support the Return of Glass-Steagall

William K. Black (from 2013)

Glass-Steagall prevented a classic conflict of interest that we know frequently arises in the real world. Commercial banks are subsidized through federal deposit insurance. Most economists support providing deposit insurance to commercial banks for relatively smaller depositors. I am not aware of any economists who support federal “deposit” insurance for the customers of investment banks or the creditors of non-financial businesses.

It violates core principles of conservatism and libertarianism to extend the federal subsidy provided to commercial banks via deposit insurance to allow that subsidy to extend to non-banking operations. Absent Glass-Steagall, banks could purchase anything from an aluminum company to a fast food franchise and (indirectly) fund its acquisitions and operations with federally-subsidized deposits. If you run an independent aluminum company or fast food franchise do you want to have to compete with a federally-subsidized rival?

Read the rest of this article on HuffPo

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Watch Moyers & Company: Too Big To Jail

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Thom Hartmann

Hillary Clinton isn’t telling a true story about Bernie Sanders and his vote for the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, or CFMA. As Robert Scheer has pointed over at TruthDig, then-Congressman Sanders voted for the CMFA not because he wanted to, but because he had to. The CMFA had been shoved into an omnibus spending bill at the last minute as part of a deal between Republicans and President Bill Clinton, and because this was a time when, you know, Congress actually did its job, Sanders bit the bullet and voted for the whole package — CFMA included — to make sure the government got the money it needed to keep running.

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LIBERALS NO LONGER AMUSED BY BERNIE SANDERS’ PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN

KEVIN GOSZTOLA

January 20, 2016

The objective of the week for liberals appears to be to make clear Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is some kind of pariah. Despite how his candidacy has transformed into a phenomenon over the past months, establishment liberals maintain the U.S. senator from Vermont should not be considered a “serious” candidate. They believe it would be a huge mistake if a Democrat with unapologetic socialist leanings won the nomination, especially over Hillary Clinton.

But these cases against Sanders are really arguments against citizens voting their conscience. The uncertainty and dismissiveness toward Sanders serves to silence any critics of the corporate-driven politics entrenched in the Democratic Party. It suggests a fear that Democrats might actually stand against corporate power for a change.

The New York Times reports “alarmed Hillary Clinton supporters” are warning Sanders “would be an electoral disaster who would frighten swing voters and send Democrats in tight congressional and governor’s races to defeat.” Supporters cast Sanders as “unelectable” and attempt to present him as the Republicans’ favored nominee because super political action committees run by operatives like Karl Rove would supposedly prefer to see the Republican nominee run against Sanders.

Liberal columnist Jonathan Chait published what is being touted as the definitive case against Sanders. Another liberal columnist, Michael Cohen, penned a shrill op-ed for The Boston Globe, entitled “Bernie Sanders doesn’t know how politics work.” Vox’s Matt Yglesias urged Democratic voters to take Sanders “seriously,” by which he means it is time to recognize all Sanders has to offer America is “half-baked” plans and populist slogans.

Read the rest of this article on ShadowProof.

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CNN/ORC Poll: Sanders Opens A Wide Lead Over Clinton In Iowa

By CONOR DINAN

JANUARY 21, 2016

01/21/16

By Kasie Hunt

HOOKSETT, New Hampshire – Planned Parenthood, the Human Rights Campaign and other progressive groups that have endorsed Hillary Clinton are not part of the political establishment, Sen. Bernie Sanders said Thursday, walking back comments he made earlier this week on MSNBC.

“That’s not what I meant,” Sanders told NBC News in an interview during his campaign swing through the first-in-the-nation primary state. “We’re a week out in the election, and the Clinton people will try to spin these things.”

Pressed on whether he views the groups as “establishment,” Sanders said: “No. They aren’t. They’re standing up and fighting the important fights that have to be fought.”

Sanders said he was specifically talking about the leadership of those groups and their endorsement decisions.

Read the rest of this article on MSNBC.com

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Read my new essay in response to Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic Montly criticizing Bernie Sanders over reparations, when both he and Hillary Clinton gave nearly identical answers to what is tantamount to political nuclear fission material.

TA-NEHISI COATES, BERNIE SANDERS, MARTIN LUTHER KING, SOCIALISM AND #REPARATIONS

Ta-Nehisi Coates in his Atlantic piece, dated January 19th, 2016, asks, “Why Precisely Is Bernie Sanders Against Reparations? The Vermont senator’s political imagination is active against plutocracy, but why is it so limited against white supremacy?”

Coates begins with Sanders’ answer to the question posed to him by Fusion’s Nando Vila.

Read the rest of my opinion piece here.

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