Here is my news roundup for the week ending January 31st, 2016.
By REBECCA KAPLAN – CBS NEWS
January 31, 2016
Bernie Sanders’ campaign said Sunday that the Vermont senator brought in more than $20 million in January in donations to his 2016 presidential campaign.
The campaign said that the money was made up almost entirely of online contributions, which averaged $27 apiece. There were more than 770,000 individual contributions, bringing the total number of individual donations for his campaign to 3.25 million.
“The numbers we’ve seen since Jan. 1 put our campaign on pace to beat Secretary Clinton’s goal of $50 million in the first quarter of 2016,” said Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ campaign manager. “Working Americans chipping in a few dollars each month are not only challenging but beating the greatest fundraising machine ever assembled.”
Read the rest at CBSNews.com
“Sad and telling,” says Sanders campaign. There’s an app for that.
Jan. 30, 2016
Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president is instructing its Iowa caucus leaders to — in certain cases — throw support to former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, with the goal blocking her main opponent, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, from securing additional delegates.
The tactical move is rooted in the complex math of the Iowa caucuses Monday night, where the campaign is looking to defeat Sanders in a state whose caucus-goers have historically backed progressive challengers.
A precinct captain, Jerome Lehtola, confirmed to BuzzFeed News that the campaign has trained precinct captains to release supporters to O’Malley if the move can make him “viable” without hurting Clinton. A Clinton aide said the campaign has trained more than 4,000 volunteer precinct captains to handle a host of different scenarios, including ones where caucus-goers are released to or recruited from another camp.
“Our precinct leadership teams have worked hard to get to know as many people in their precincts as possible and they’ll use those relationships to maximize Hillary Clinton’s delegate count depending on which groups are viable on caucus night,” the aide said.
The goal, in the caucuses’ complex terms, is to cost Clinton no delegates in the state’s 1,681 caucuses while ensuring stray O’Malley supporters don’t defect to Sanders.
Read the rest of this article on BuzzFeed.com
If you’re doing everything right but find it harder and harder to get by, you’re not alone.
Posted by Bernie Sanders on Friday, November 20, 2015
If you’re doing everything right but find it harder and harder to get by, you’re not alone.
Posted by Bernie Sanders on Friday, November 20, 2015
If you’re doing everything right but find it harder and harder to get by, you’re not alone.
Posted by Bernie Sanders on Friday, November 20, 2015
Aki Soga, Free Press Reader Engagement Editor
January 30, 2016
Update: The Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver sent out an email Saturday morning announcing the campaign topped 3 million contributions
As of 10:17 am,the campaign had amassed 3,022,945 individual contributions, Weavers said in his email to supporters.
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Sen. Bernie Sanders is pushing to hit a record 3 million contributions to his campaign by the weekend, telling potential donors on Thursday, “tomorrow is the last day we can put it to work to win Iowa.”
The Vermont independent making a bid for the Democratic presidential nomination faces his first real test on Monday when Iowa residents cast the first votes of the 2016 primary in caucuses throughout the state.
Read the rest of this article at the BurlingtonFreePress website.
Jan. 28 2016
For years, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has repeatedlycomplained about the D.C. orthodoxy-enforcing tactic of labeling only those who subscribe to Washington pieties as “Very Serious People,” or “VSPs.” It’s a term Krugman borrowed (with credit) from the liberal blogger Atrios, who first coined it to illustrate how Iraq War opponents were instantly marginalized in establishment discourse and only war advocates were deemed to be Serious. Krugman mockingly uses it so often that the New York Times created a special tag for the term. The primary purpose of the “VSP” tactic is to malign anyone who dissents from D.C. establishment pieties as non-Serious or un-Serious, thus demeaning the person as someone who can (and should) be ignored as residing on the fringe, unworthy of engagement or a real platform regardless of the merits of their position.
Yesterday, one of the purest and most noxious examples of this tactic was invoked — by Paul Krugman. The longtime Clinton defender announced that all Serious policy experts “lean Hillary”; he even used the term “serious” unironically to advance his claim:
Meanwhile, the Sanders skepticism of the wonks continues: Paul Starr lays out the case. As far as I can tell, every serious progressive policy expert on either health care or financial reform who has weighed in on the primary seems to lean Hillary.
Let’s repeat that: “Every serious progressive policy expert on either health care or financial reform who has weighed in on the primary seems to lean Hillary.”
Read the rest of Glenn Greenwald’s op-ed on TheIntercept
Glenn Greenwald
January 31, 2016
The concoction of the “Bernie Bro” narrative by pro-Clinton journalists has been a potent political tactic — and a journalistic disgrace. It’s intended to imply two equally false claims: (1) a refusal to march enthusiastically behind the Wall Street-enriched, multiple-war-advocating, despot-embracing Hillary Clinton is explainable not by ideology or political conviction, but largely if not exclusively by sexism: demonstrated by the fact that men, not women, support Sanders (his supporters are “bros”); and(2) Sanders supporters are uniquely abusive and misogynistic in their online behavior. Needless to say, a crucial tactical prong of this innuendo is that any attempt to refute it is itself proof of insensitivity to sexism if not sexism itself (as the accusatory reactions to this article will instantly illustrate).
It’s become such an all-purpose, handy pro-Clinton smear that evenconsummate, actual “bros” for whom the term was originally coined — straight guys who act with entitlement and aggression, such as Paul Krugman — are now reflexively (and unironically) applying it to anyone who speaks ill of Hillary Clinton, even when they know nothing else about the people they’re smearing, including their gender, age, or sexual orientation. Thus, a male policy analyst who criticized Sanders’ health care plan “is getting the Bernie Bro treatment,” sneered Krugman. Unfortunately for the New York Times Bro, that analyst, Charles Gaba, said in response that he’s “really not comfortable with [Krugman’s] referring to die-hard Bernie Sanders supporters as ‘Bernie Bros’” because it “implies that only college-age men support Sen. Sanders, which obviously isn’t the case.”
It is indeed “obviously not the case.” There are literally millions of women who support Sanders over Clinton. A new Iowa poll yesterday showsSanders with a 15-point lead over Clinton among women under 45, while one-third of Iowa women over 45 support him.
Read the rest of Greenwald’s excellent piece on TheIntercept.com
By Ed Rogers January 27, 2016
Even with all the drama of the 2016 Republican contest for the presidential nomination, it is impossible not to notice the slow-motion train wreck that is the Hillary Clinton campaign.
The campaign is beset by four woes that don’t seem to have any quick remedy. The only way forward for the Democratic front-runner is to hunker down, slog it out and win ugly. Since “malaise” is an overused word in politics, I’ll categorize Clinton’s campaign as “desultory” – or, “lacking a plan or enthusiasm.”
Clinton’s four problems are obvious: Her performance as a candidate, her opponent’s viability, a growing scandal that could lead to the indictment of the former first lady and possibly a few of her closest aides, and the rejection of her legitimacy as a feminist leader.
First, her performance as a candidate is weak and not getting stronger. Nothing about her is fresh, exciting or appealing. President Obama called it early — she just doesn’t have that “new-car smell.” Clinton’s style is stuck in the ’80s, when “message discipline” was all about delivering talking points no matter what. Sticking to the script was considered artful. Repeating yourself and having a high word count but low content was considered clever. Those days are over. Either Clinton doesn’t know that or she can’t change her style. To watch her on TV can be toe-curling. To listen to her rehearsed lines, and, recently, to hear her force Obama’s name into her answers is so contrived it lends itself to parody for SNL.
Clinton’s second problem is the viability of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Among the things I have gotten wrong so far in the 2016 cycle is the fact that Sanders has people who are affirmatively supporting him. I thought he would be the gadfly candidate — the anti-Clinton candidate and nothing more. Instead, he is building a legitimate following. It not only says something about the Democratic Party’s move to the left, but it also says something about him as a candidate that I did not anticipate. He seems to be getting better as a candidate, while Clinton seems to have plateaued. The emotional appeal of Sanders is vividly entrenched within the Democratic Party and is forcing Clinton to limp to the left, which will make it harder for her during the general election if she is the Democrats’ eventual nominee. The excitement surrounding Sanders is only making Clinton look even more stale.
Read the rest of this op-ed at WashingtonPost.com
Here’s what Bill and Hillary mean to me: Sister Souljah, welfare reform, Ricky Ray Rector and the crime bill
It may be a generational thing—I was born in 1967—but this is what Hillary and Bill Clinton will always mean to me: Sister Souljah, Ricky Ray Rector, welfare reform, and the crime bill. And beyond—really, behind—all that, the desperate desire to win over white voters by declaring to the American electorate: We are not the Party of Jesse Jackson, we are not the Rainbow Coalition.
Many of the liberal journalists who are supporting Hillary Clinton’s candidacy are too young to remember what the Clintons did to American politics and the Democratic Party in the 1990s. But even journalists who are old enough seem to have forgotten just how much the Clintons’ national ascendancy was premised on the repudiation of black voters and black interests. This was a move that was both inspired and applauded by a small but influential group of Beltway journalists and party strategists, who believed making the Democrats a white middle-class party was the only path back to the White House after wandering for 12 years in the Republican wilderness.
But for me, it’s as vivid as yesterday. I still remember Clinton pollster Stanley Greenberg’s American Prospect article (reposted in 2005), which claimed that the Democrats were “too identified with minorities and special interests to speak for average Americans.” Black people not being average Americans, you see. This article, American Prospect co-editor Paul Starr proudly proclaimed last year, is “widely recognized for its influence on Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign” in 1992. Starr, incidentally, just penned a defense in Politico of Hillary Clinton as the only serious Democratic candidate.
Read the rest of this article on Salon.com
For those who rightfully claim there is a media blackout of Bernie Sanders in the United States, they are underestimating the issue. There has been a media blackout here in Europe too. The BBC have finally acknowledged that Hillary Clinton no longer leads in New Hampshire and Iowa and that her campaign has hit a “blip”.
Read the rest of this article on Cricicl.com
January 29, 2016
I’ve noted, quite often, in my New York Times commentary over the last eighteen months, that I see a change in Professor Paul Krugman.He stopped writing about the “Lost Generation,” what I call the precariat in my own writing. Krugman has been writing an inordinately high number of op-eds praising the number of jobs created in the aftermath of the Great Recession, and the success of Obamacare. He’s also written, here and there, pieces that move away from the progressive kind of writing he engaged in during the worst of the financial melt-down, aligning himself with former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, whom he praised a lot during the worst of the recession, but also criticized a fair amount. Of late, however, Krugman is more aligned with Bernanke’s current views on banking and the state of reform, than not. Back in October, as Bernanke’s memoir hit the shelves, he gave ABC’s This Week an extended interview. That interview was striking in the sense that, as proactive as Bernanke was as Fed Chair, it revealed how removed from Main Street he is. Hillary Clinton, in many ways, sounds just like Ben, when she talks about Wall Street and the underlying deficiencies of today’s job market.
Over these past couple of weeks, we have seen a surge in very odd and angry anti-Bernie Sanders diatribes from the nation’s prominent pundits, including The New York Times’ Paul Krugman who has now devoted two full op-eds and a half dozen blog posts in attempts at de-legitimizing Bernie Sanders’ policies, including Sanders’ healthcare for all platform, also known as Single Payer Healthcare.
Read the rest of my op-ed on Blog#42
January 26, 2016
Clinton blundered twice on matters of history and race during CNN’s Iowa Democratic Town Hall. Her first blunder was this statement:
“I have a 40-year record of going after inequality. And not only economic inequality: racial inequality, sexist inequality, homophobic inequality. The kinds of things that go after people to put them down and push them back”
Read the rest of this op-ed and view the video clips on Blog#42
January 24, 2016
Citing the New York Times, the UK’s The Guardian reports that former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg is contemplating entering the presidential race. Bloomberg, who left the GOP at the end of his mayoral stint, is now an independent.
According to The Guardian’s sources, Bloomberg has commissioned his own poll to determine the level of interest a possible run might generate, and will make a final decision in March, close to the filing deadline. The reason? Bloomberg, who is said to be on “cordial” terms with the Clintons, is less than impressed with Clinton’s primary performance, has deemed her continuing email woes as a flaw, and finds her fall in the Iowa polls “scary.” The Times piece quotes unnamed sources as saying that Bloomberg is willing to spend as much as $1 billion out of his estimated $37 billion fortune.
Bloomberg’s calculus for entering the fray not only proves every single point Sanders has ever made about money, billionaires and politics, but contradicts the long held views of pundits such as Paul Krugman, Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein and many others who now argue against a Sanders win of the Democratic primary because his goals are unrealistic.
Read the rest of my piece on Blog#42
27 Jan 2016
I may be a bit out of my depth here but let me offer a few thoughts on a debate among progressives that leaves me scratching away at the old noggin.’ Here are the bones of the thing, as I kinda understand them:
Argument 1: “Bernie supporters, you’re going to blow this for us!”
–Hillary’s ideas are less radical than Bernie’s, ergo they’re more politically realistic.
–If you don’t get this, you too are not realistic and, by getting behind an un-electable candidate, you’re going to lose everything for the left.
Counterargument 1: “Hillary supporters, wake up and smell the revolution!”
–Your limited vision is why progressives can’t get anywhere. Stop trying to slam shut the Overton window (the range of acceptable discourse) that Bernie is trying to open.
–You’re a shill for Wall St.
Read the rest of Jared Bernstein’s blog post on Blog#42
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