This is my news roundup for the week ending April 17, 2016.
Bernie Sanders appeared on ABC’s This week after Hillary Clinton:
Something Is Going Seriously Wrong with New York Voter Registrations
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New York’s Democratic primary is starting to look an awful lot like the Arizona primary.
Hundreds of voters, most of them registered with the Democratic Party, are filing a class-action lawsuit against the New York State Board of Elections on Monday morning, claiming their voter registration was changed to “independent” or “no affiliation” without their consent.
In closed primary states like New York, voters who are not registered as Democrats or Republicans can’t vote in those primaries. Voters identifying as independents wishing to vote in the Democratic primary had to change their registration to Democrat by October of 2015 — the earliest registration deadline in the country.
This is almost exactly what happened in Arizona, when voters who had been eager to vote in the Democratic primary learned upon arrival to their designated polling place that their registration had been changed, making them ineligible to vote.
Read the rest of this article on USUncut.
What’s Wrong With the DNC? Debbie Wasserman Schultz | #MoneyInPolitics on Blog#42
April 9, 2016
Why Krugman’s Latest Attack on Sanders’ Economic Plans Is Wrong
Economists Bill Black and Michael Hudson respond to Paul Krugman’s latest New York Times column, “Sanders Over the Edge”
https://youtu.be/WdbJXilm81Y
Read the transcript on TheRealNews.
Thanks to Bernie Sanders, we now know how many big corporations don’t pay taxes
By Max Ehrenfreund | April 14
Bernie Sanders asked federal accountants to tally up how many major corporations pay nothing in federal income taxes, and now we know the answer.
On the stump, Sanders has been denouncing the special treatment that he says big firms get from the government. It’s been a crucial part of his pitch to voters throughout his unexpectedly successful presidential campaign so far.
The data the senator from Vermont requested from the Government Accountability Office do indeed suggest that the vast majority of firms don’t pay federal corporate income taxes, but the report also complicates the story Sanders has been telling on the campaign trail.
Of the 1.6 million corporations active in the United States in 2012, 70 percent had no federal corporate income tax liability. (These firms likely pay other taxes, of course, such as payroll taxes and local sales taxes.)
Read the rest of this article on WashingtonPost.com.
Message to readers:
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Thank you.
I saw this tweet by Charles M. Blow
Now let me grab a cup of coffee and drop by this Sanders' rally in @prospect_park … if I can find it. That park is YUUUGE…
— Charles M. Blow (@CharlesMBlow) April 17, 2016
Since he didn’t tweet a follow-up, I thought I’d check on attendance at Prospect Park:
Bernie Sanders Unleashes Scathing Speech In Front Of Record Crowd Of 28,300 In Brooklyn
Bernie Sanders drew a record crowd of 28,300 to Prospect Park in Brooklyn, NY, who heard the Democratic presidential candidate pull no punches in a massive effort to get his supporters ready to vote in Tuesday’s New York Democratic primary.
https://youtu.be/CKRlYRMCcSU
Read the rest of this report on PoliticsUSA.com
Robert Scheer v. Torie Osborn: A Heated Debate on Sanders vs. Clinton with Two Longtime Progressives
Courtesy DemocracyNow!
Obama likely to sit out Democratic primary altogether, White House aides say
President Obama is likely to sit out the entire presidential primary season amid concerns about the damage he could do by stepping too soon into a contentious Democratic contest running far longer than he expected.
Prominent fault lines have emerged in recent days in the Democratic race that threaten to permanently damage the party. But seeing no clear way for Obama to unify Democrats without alienating key voters, White House aides are gambling that the president will still have enough time to rally the party before the November general election even if both Democratic candidates stay in the race until the final primary votes are cast in June.
The risks are clear: If Obama jumped into the fray too early, he would jeopardize the loyalty of supporters of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. He also stands to be accused of acting in the interests of the establishment so deeply resented by large swaths of the electorate this campaign cycle. Both could cost votes in November.
Read the rest of this article on LATimes.com
To Protect Hillary Clinton, Democrats Wage War on Their Own Core Citizens United Argument
Glenn Greenwald | April 14
FOR YEARS, THE Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Citizens United was depicted by Democrats as the root of all political evil. But now, the core argument embraced by the Court’s conservatives to justify their ruling has taken center stage in the Democratic primary between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders — because Clinton supporters, to defend the huge amount of corporate cash on which their candidate is relying, frequently invoke that very same reasoning.
The crux of the Citizens United ruling was that a legal ban on independent corporate campaign expenditures constituted a limit on political speech without sufficient justification, and thus violated the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee. A primary argument of the Obama Justice Department and Democrats generally in order to uphold that campaign finance law was that corporate expenditures are so corrupting of the political process that limits are justified even if they infringe free speech. In rejecting that view, this was the key argument of Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the five-judge conservative majority (emphasis added):
For the reasons explained above, we now conclude that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.
Does that sound familiar? It should. That key argument of the right-wing justices in Citizens United has now become the key argument of the Clinton campaign and its media supporters to justify her personal and political receipt of millions upon millions of dollars in corporate money: “Expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption” — at least when the candidate in question is Hillary Clinton.
Read the rest on The Intercept.com
Clinton, Sanders campaigns join DNC suit over alleged Arizona voter suppression
Washington (CNN) The Democratic National Committee, along with Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders’ campaigns, are suing the state of Arizona following complaints of voter suppression during the Arizona primary last month.
Voters endured long waits to use one of Maricopa County’s 60 polling stations last month. There were at least 200 polling stations in 2012, but Republican officials said they decreased the number to save money.
Even after waiting in line for hours, some people were not allowed to vote. At least 20 Democratic voters contacted the Arizona Democratic Party to say that when they arrived at the polls, they were told that they were registered as Independents and therefore unable to vote in the closed primary.
Bill Clinton Says Bernie Sanders Supporters Would “shoot every third person on Wall Street.”
https://youtu.be/Hql6CnF8DtM