Month: February 2016

Well, one group of individuals that has not given up is Sanders’s army of small donors. The Sanders campaign just announced that they raised more than $40 million in February and are now trying to get to $45 million by midnight.

In case you don’t know, those are insane numbers. If he accomplishes little else, Sanders has proven the concept that you can run a presidential election funded by regular folks.

I don’t even know what they can do with all that money. But he’s got no reason to drop out.

I’ll tell you, it makes sense to want two seemingly contradictory things at the same time. You might want Clinton to be the nominee and still want Sanders to have as close to half of the delegates at the convention as possible. In other words, you may want to vote for Sanders even if you don’t actually want him to win.

Why would you want this?

Because you want a progressive party with a progressive platform and progressive rules changes, but you’re not ready to roll the dice on Sanders as the nominee.

If the polls are anywhere near correct, it’s a risk-free proposition with no downside.

One thing I used to debate with Ed Kilgore about was whether or not we’re stuck in a 40-40 nation where any major party candidate will be assured of finishing relatively close in a presidential election or whether we’re entering into a turbulent time where one party may utterly lose the political argument and go down Goldwater-McGovern-Mondale style.

I was more open to the latter possibility than Ed, but that was last year and things have gotten steadily crazier since.

Not too long ago, I was criticizing Nate Silver for discounting Trump’s chances of winning the Republican nomination. Now he’s talking realignment.

So, things change.

Rather than do another deep analysis here, I want to start a discussion.

I have a theory that the Republicans rely heavily on their ability to stay on message and keep united behind narratives. Obviously, they have their own cable news network and they dominate political radio, so they have some advantages over the left in terms of their ability to promulgate their messages. I think, however, that the effectiveness of their politics depends heavily on the cohesiveness of their movement. If all their media platforms are rowing together, it works so well that they can convert their voters to climate change skeptics overnight. But, when they start suffering from internal divisions, I think the hive (colony?) mind gets disrupted like when you kick over an ant hill.

My theory is that they’re so reliant on this ability to move people from message to message that they can’t operate without it.

Now, things are always messy during a contested primary season, but if the Republicans can’t unite around a nominee then this problem won’t go away after their convention in Cleveland.

This is kind of how I see the mechanism of their collapse working. If they are about to lose a realigning election, this is going to be one of the prime reasons why.

In other words, it’s not just defections for reasons of ideology, but an inability to campaign coherently and with focus.

So, do you think I am on to something?

In 2014, nearly 20,000 people in this country died because they overdosed on a prescription opioid. Nearly 30,000 people died because they overdosed on any kind of opioid, including the illegal types like heroin. The numbers are not in yet for 2015, but everyone expects that they’ll be even worse.

Politicians are finally noticing that we’re experiencing a health disaster that’s been as deadly or deadlier than the AIDS and crack cocaine epidemics of the 1980s. The Senate Judiciary Committee is trying to work through the process of marking up and sending the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act [CARA] to the floor. They’re scheduled to have a bunch of votes today, and unfortunately the whole thing has become politicized.

As the Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim and Jason Cherkis reported last week, Sen. Chuck Schumer is getting involved in a way that’s making supporters of the bill uneasy.

The root of the problem is that the lead author of the bill is vulnerable Republican incumbent Rob Portman of Ohio. While there are official denials all around, some anonymous sources on both sides of the aisle are accusing Schumer of being reluctant to give Portman a political win that he can take to the voters in November. If true, it’s the same kind of nihilism that Mitch McConnell has been pilloried for authoring in response to the election of Barack Obama in 2008.

The dispute, at least on the surface, is about funding levels in the bill. Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) has an amendment that would authorize $600 million on an emergency basis. The Republicans aren’t willing to spend that kind of money, so Schumer is arguing aggressively that they aren’t serious about the opioid problem.

This might be considered Basic Politics 101, except that the gambit threatens to kill the bill in its entirety. And that’s not something organizers (or even Senate Democrats working on this issue) are interested in seeing. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse was reportedly upset enough with Schumer’s posturing that he skipped a press conference with him on the funding amendment.

Senate Democrats and drug policy groups pushing for a strong response to the heroin epidemic are growing increasingly concerned that Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is dangerously politicizing the issue, risking what has been steady, if slow, bipartisan progress…

…The bad news is that some of the states that are in the most desperate need of help also happen to be home to some of the Republican senators Democrats would most like to knock off in 2016. And if the Democrats pick up enough seats, Schumer is poised to become Senate majority leader…

“[M]eaningful progress on the opioid and heroin epidemic is only possible when policymakers commit to moving forward in a bipartisan fashion,” the letter [to the Senate] from the Harm Reduction Coalition reads.

“We have appreciated the bipartisan spirit of collaboration with which Senate Committees have thoughtfully approached these issues, emblematized by the strong support in the Judiciary Committee and amongst the broader community for [CARA]. Harm Reduction Coalition requests that you honor this bipartisanship as you work to advance this bill to the Senate floor,” reads the letter, which was sent this weekend to Senate leaders and provided to The Huffington Post by a Senate source.

Sen. Whitehouse seemed to get with the program later on.

Democrats want to add the money to a smaller bipartisan measure negotiated by Portman, Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and others that would authorize grants for prevention and treatment programs. The bill is set for a Senate procedural vote Monday.

“There comes a time when something has taken enough American lives that you have to take it seriously,” Whitehouse said in an interview at the Capitol. “It would be unfortunate if they insisted on passing a bill that addresses this issue without being willing to put a nickel behind it. I think that’s really dishonorable and I hope they won’t do that.”

Honestly, the funding here is of secondary importance for a variety of reasons. First, the most important thing is that Congress come to a consensus that this is one of the biggest problems facing the country and authorize a response. Second, while a problem of this size certainly requires substantial resources, the money being discussed here is insignificant whether it’s appropriated or not. Third, much of the money under discussion isn’t even devoted to tackling the emergency. Research is nice, but what’s needed is tens of thousands of beds for people who are addicted to opioids and require long-term intense treatment. Other monies are devoted to law enforcement, which is also potentially useful but runs counter to overall thrust to get people to treat this as more of a public health fiasco than a criminal one.

To his credit, Schumer has been talking about the opioid epidemic for a while now. I’d hate to see him screw this up because he’s so reluctant to give people any reason to reelect vulnerable Republicans.

Let’s get Congress to agree that something must be done.

Once that’s done, the brutal facts on the ground will eventually lead even the blind to better solutions that are more sensibly targeted and more proportionate to the enormous task at hand.

Iran has voted. The reformers had huge victories. The hardliners were crushed. According to President Obama’s critics, this shouldn’t have happened.

More later, and “Thanks, Obama.”

Bill Clinton’s Labor Secretary Endorses Bernie Sanders

 « click for more info
The Morality of a $15 Minimum ... A Living Wage!

Tweet from Robert Reich:
I endorse Bernie Sanders for President of the United States. He’s leading a movement to reclaim America for the many, not the few. And such a political mobilization – a “political revolution,” as he puts it — is the only means by which we can get the nation back from the moneyed interests that now control so much of our economy and democracy.

This extraordinary concentration of income, wealth, and political power at the very top imperils all else – our economy, our democracy, the revival of the American middle class, the prospects for the poor and for people of color, the necessity of slowing and reversing climate change, and a sensible foreign policy not influenced by the “military-industrial complex,” as President Dwight Eisenhower once called it. It is the fundamental prerequisite: We have little hope of achieving positive change on any front unless the American people are once again in control.

I have the deepest respect and admiration for Hillary Clinton, and if she wins the Democratic primary I’ll work my heart out to help her become president. But I believe Bernie Sanders is the agent of change this nation so desperately needs.

○ From BooMan’s fp story – Re: Clinton Now on Glide Path to the Nomination

I’ve always been grateful to hold a minority opinion, even in the Democratic Party: from the Vietnam War till today. No anomosity towards Bill or Hillary, just making an honest assessment.

DNC vice chair resigns, endorses Bernie Sanders

Representative Tulsi Gabbard has resigned from her post as vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee in order to support Bernie Sanders. She made the announcement on the NBC show Meet the Press.

“I think it’s most important for us, as we look at our choices as to who our next commander in chief will be, is to recognize the necessity to have a commander in chief who has foresight, who exercises good judgment,” she said.

Gabbard, an Iraq war veteran and representative for Hawaii, is the fourth member of Congress to endorse Sanders. She elaborated on her decision on the show: “As a veteran and as a soldier I’ve seen firsthand the true cost of war.

“I served in a medical unit during my first deployment, where every single day I saw firsthand the very high human cost of that war. I see it in my friends who now, a decade after we’ve come home, are still struggling to get out of a black hole.

“I think it’s most important for us, as we look at our choices as to who our next commander in chief will be, is to recognize the necessity to have a commander in chief who has foresight, exercises good judgment, who looks beyond the consequences, looks at the consequences of the actions they’re looking to take, before they take those actions, so we don’t continue to find ourselves in these failures that have resulted in chaos in the Middle East and so much loss of life.”

Veteran congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard says police should not act like military | UPI – 2014 |

Prophetic words from Martin Luther King Jr. in 1967:
“Choice between War and Fighting Poverty at Home”

More below the fold …

Let’s no forget MLK, Jr. … and lonely struggle

Let’s no forget MLK, Jr’s popularity within the AA community when he shifted from pure civil rights
to anti-war and a class based economic critique. The Black Panthers did some of that as well.

by Marie3 on Sun Feb 28th, 2016 at 12:27:02 PM PDT

Who knew that an old VT/NY democratic socialist Jew wouldn’t be popular with SC AA voters?
But with 13% of the SC AA vote, that’s not too shabby considering that:

A Harris poll conducted after King’s Vietnam speech found that only 25 percent of even
African Americans supported him in his antiwar turn — “only 9 percent of the public
at large agreed with his objections to the war.”

Did anyone else here at the Pond watch the live broadcast of MLK, Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech?
As a kid it was a stretch for me to understand it fully, but it was clear to me that it was important
and it thrilled me on a deep and profound level.

Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence

Delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City

by Marie3 on Sun Feb 28th, 2016 at 01:08:16 PM PDT

This speech of MLK has been in my signature line for a number of years:

His eloquent speech ended thus:

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter — but beautiful — struggle for a new world. This is the callling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:

Once to every man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth and falsehood,
For the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God’s new Messiah,
Off’ring each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever
Twixt that darkness and that light.

Though the cause of evil prosper,
Yet ’tis truth alone is strong;
Though her portion be the scaffold,
And upon the throne be wrong:
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow
Keeping watch above his own.
.

MLK – a visionary with prophetic words. Had the courage to go against the mainstream America. Had wrestled with this decision between loyalty to the president and his conscience. Bullits kill more than just a man: MLK and RFK in 1968. In the 1960s US government inserted fear of the red wave in the America’s, Africa and Southeast Asia: domino theory. Since 9/11 Bush/Cheney/Sharon inserted fear of the black-flag Islam into US foreign policy for self-interest. Creating the movement of another right-wing fascism across the Western world.

Society doesn’t react with mass protest. Why?? There is no place for solidarity on such a large scale. People need to hang on in their lives, family, jobs and low income. High incarceration rates and lacking of universal health care for all. Don’t rock the boat, leave us the status quo. Law enforcement is well equipped to quell protest, subdue the underprivileged and keep the powerful 1% on top. Bill and HRC have done well financially, but can and will they represent the 1% or 47%?

Equal opportunity starts before birth, but quality of primary education is crucial in people’s lives with opportunity to develop one’s talent at college or university level. A lot has changed since MLK, but the “white folks” are always pushing back to reverse equal rights. Wall Street, the banking crisis and the trillion plus expensive march into Baghdad has cost Mainstreet dearly.

○ I Have A Dream- Remembering Martin Luther King, Jr. by refinish69 on April 4, 2008

The dream of MLK was shortly relived in the person of senator BHO. He drew the crowds, inserted enthusiasm and hope and the appreciation of AA in America showed on Election and Inauguration Day. Hillary is no Barack!

Here’s a snapshot of America in February 2016:

Sometimes words fail me.

As best as I could ascertain the thinking inside the Sanders campaign, they thought that if Bernie could do better than 35% in South Carolina it would indicate that he had a fighting chance to win in some other southern states. Well, he barely topped 25% and now he has to abandon the entire South to Clinton.

Super Tuesday could easily now became a wipeout that effectively eliminates Sanders from serious contention. As Nate Cohn notes in the New York Times, even in the increasingly unlikely event that Sanders pulls off multiple wins on Tuesday in states like Colorado, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, and Vermont, the delegate math is going to look much worse for him at the end of the night. If he doesn’t pull off these wins, his campaign will no longer be something that should be considered a threat to win the nomination.

It seems to me that black folks got the message loud and clear from the president that he prefers Clinton to Sanders, and anyone who thinks that they aren’t going to come out in huge numbers to protect his legacy is completely delusional.

She has won South Carolina in a rout, 73.5 percent to 26 percent, exceeding Mr. Obama’s own 29-point victory in 2008. She did it the same way that Mr. Obama did: with overwhelming support from black voters, who favored Mrs. Clinton over Bernie Sanders by a stunning margin of 87 to 13, according to updated exit polls — a tally that would be larger than Mr. Obama’s victory among black voters eight years earlier. Black voters represented 62 percent of the electorate, according to exit polls, even higher than in 2008.

The county’s most progressive and loyal Democrats have spoken.

Maybe you agree with their decision or maybe you don’t, but you ought to respect it.

At some point in the not-too-distant future, I may write a piece about the nominating process, including my thoughts on things like caucuses and superdelegates. I just want to make a kind of general point right now, however.

There’s nothing remotely democratic about how the two parties pick their nominees, and it’s basically a complete misconception to think that these processes are even close enough to democratic to be violating the spirit of democratic elections.

To give one obvious example from the Republican side, states that hold their contests prior to March 15th must award their delegates proportionately to candidates that meet a non-uniform minimum threshold. So, in one state a candidate may need 15% to get a single delegate and in another state they may need twenty percent. Then, on March 15th and thereafter, states have the option to award their delegates on a plurality-win-all basis. So, Rubio could win all of Florida’s 99 delegates by getting a single vote more than Trump, but Trump would have had to share a lot of South Carolina delegates with Rubio if Rubio had met the minimum threshold there in a proportional election.

This is just one of several examples I could provide of how the votes in one state are in no way equal to the votes in other states. Another important example that I’ll mention is how the delegates are divided up among the states. It’s not evenly, by population, as the Electoral College imperfectly attempts to do. States that voted blue last time get more delegates in the Democratic contest and states that voted red last time get more delegates in the Republican contest.

We can add in that the nomination is usually decided before most states even get a chance to vote, and certainly many of the candidates drop out quickly because they couldn’t win over voters in early unrepresentative states, which means, e.g., that Christie voters in 48 states never got a chance to cast a meaningful vote for him.

The correct way to think about these nominating processes is as a quest. The candidates embark on a long journey with arbitrary rules and random obstacles. Their only advantage is that they are given a map well ahead of time and this gives them the chance to strategize and anticipate the most obvious obstacles that they’ll find in their paths.

They can therefore come up with plans, although the very arbitrariness of the schedule and rules will disadvantage some candidates…some fatally. Rudy Giuliani can say that his plan doesn’t involve winning before Florida, but that doesn’t mean that his strategy has any hope of success. If the first primary had been held in New York, maybe Giuliani could have gotten some traction and some money to run a long campaign. Whatever his personal flaws and weaknesses, with the way the game was played, Rudy never had a fair shot.

So, it’s basically an odyssey where some heroes have an easy path and others must slay one dragon after another. Superdelegates are one dragon. Caucuses are another dragon. For candidates whose base of support is in the North, the SEC Super Tuesday primaries are even another dragon.

The reason the process works at all is because it’s a rigorous test. If you can run the obstacle course and reach the end first, you’ve shown skills in organizing, staffing, fundraising, debating, schmoozing party big-wigs, retail politicking, speechmaking, and working with media. You’ve demonstrated superhuman personal stamina. You’ve taken multiple punches and either shown an iron chin or gotten up off the mat.

It’s not a democratic process and it isn’t supposed to be. It’s a trial by fire that hopefully prepares you to hold the most powerful office in the world and also demonstrates to voters that you’ve got what it takes.

We could scrap this whole system root and branch and just have one national primary day when the whole country votes. That would tell us who had the most support on that one day, but it wouldn’t tell us who is tough enough to stand in the Oval Office.

Our system has all kinds of flaws and it can certainly be improved. But it also has merits.

You won’t understand the flaws or appreciate the merits if you think the process is supposed to be democratic in the same way as our general elections are, however.

With Hillary’s overwhelming victory in South Carolina, it’s time to get on board the train and ride this thing beyond the convention and all the way to the White House. The train will stop from time to time as Bernie wins a state or two, but the growing momentum Hillary is getting as more and more states fall to her, means the die is cast. Democrats, independents and even Republicans, who will not under any circumstances, vote for Donald Trump are invited.

ALL ABOARD!!!!!!

Idiot Klansmen tried to have a White Lives Matter rally in Anaheim, California. Dolts got kicked in the face.

They also managed to stab a couple of counter-protestors, reportedly with the end of a flag pole.

My favorite part was this:

Brian Levin, director of CSU San Bernardino’s Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, said he was standing next to the man in the Grand Dragon shirt when a crowd of protesters carrying weapons swarmed the Klansmen.

A brawl broke out and one of the Klansmen was knocked to the ground and kicked. Levin said he later saw the man’s arm bleeding.

Levin said he pushed the Klan leader away as the violence continued and a protester was stabbed.

Levin said he asked the man, “How do you feel that a Jewish guy just saved your life?”

“Thank you,” the man replied, according to Levin.

The Grand Dragon got a well-deserved beat down, got saved by the Jewish guy who directs an anti-hate center at CSU-Bernardino, and then had to thank him.

Call it a teaching moment.