Introducing ‘The President Erdogan Offensive Poetry Competition’ – £1000 prize to be won Spectator. NC readers have provide many clever original poems in the comments section. Time to put those talents to profitable use!
Do Honeybees Feel? Scientists Are Entertaining the Idea New York Times (David L)
Earth’s Temperature Just Shattered the Thermometer Bloomberg
Just 7% of Barrier Reef escapes bleaching BBC :-(
Scientists want to use nanobots to suck pollutants from the ocean Business Insider (David L)
Facebook considers letting users add a tip jar to make money from posts
Lithium War Heats Up After Epic Launch Of Tesla Model 3 OilPrice (resilc)
Antibiotics Have Given Us Untreatable Gonorrhea Motherboard
Utah declares porn public health hazard BBC
Scientists identify link between brain development and cancer University of Queensland
Mossack Fonseca
Panama Papers: US launches criminal inquiry into tax avoidance claims Guardian
China?
China cannot delay on its bad debts bogey Financial Times
Brazil?
Dilma Rousseff’s Impeachment Isn’t a Coup, It’s a Cover-Up New York Times (furzy)
EU chief to charge Google over anti-competitive practices, sources say Guardian
Irish Times: US taxpayers growing tired of Ireland’s one big idea Tax Justice Network
Brexit?
UK’s friends right to fear Brexit and say so Financial Times
Staying in EU ‘best hope’ for UK’s future says US BBC. Eight former Treasury Secretaries tell British voters what is in their best interest. I suspect this will not impress the undecided, particularly since these officials were in charge in the runup to the crisis.
EU is unpopular because it meddles, admits Juncker Telegraph
Palmyra’s Arch of Triumph recreated in London BBC
Syraqistan
The First Draft of History: Dispatches From the Frontline of War Patrick Cockburn, Counterpunch. Important.
Obama Went From Condemning Saudis for Abuses to Arming Them to the Teeth Intercept (resilc)
Syria peace talks founder after dispute over transitional government Guardian
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
Microsoft and Google Want to Let Artificial Intelligence Loose on Our Most Private Data MIT Technology Review (David L)
EFF sues DOJ for access to secret court orders on decryption TechCrunch
Imperial Collapse Watch
How The American Neoconservatives Destroyed Mankind’s Hopes For Peace Paul Craig Roberts
Libya and the 5 Stages of U.S. Intervention National Interest
Andrew Bacevich: Why America’s All-Volunteer Force fails to win wars Dallas Morning News (resilc)
The Indebted Way We Live Now American Conservative
2016. Needless to say, I’m disappointed by the NY primary results. There were some anomalies. First, just after 9 PM, CNN projected 62% to 38% in favor of Hillary even as CNBC was saying it was too close to call and Fox was projecting 52% to 48%. Second, there was a good bit of vote suppression, in the form of last-minute changes in polling stations. Political scientist Tom Ferguson said to me via phone, “Closed primaries are a problem. The party had end to end control of the voting apparatus. For an avowed socialist to get 42% against Clinton in New York is still pretty remarkable.” But the Sanders campaign mismanaged expectations of its followers. And with the benefit of hindsight, the trip to the Vatican probably did not pay off, as the local media ignored the story. Sanders looked like he was over before Michigan. Can he be the Comeback Kid again?
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton Win Easily in New York New York Times
Trump, Clinton Win New York Primaries to Control Their Races Bloomberg. Lambert points out that Trump gave a prepared speech as opposed to his usual stream of consciousness.
Exclusive Footage: Stories From New York Primary Voters Alternet. Interesting as far as it goes, but they needed a lot more interviews.
Millions of New Yorkers Disenfranchised From Primaries Thanks to State’s Restrictive Voting Laws Democracy Now!
New York’s Flawed Primary Bloomberg. Editorial. Blooomberg and Amy Goodman on the same page?
Comptroller Will Audit New York City Board of Elections Observer (martha r)
De Blasio Demands Explanation, as Decline in Registered Brooklyn Democrats Doubles to 126,000 WNYC (furzy). Awfully convenient for him to be concerned now.
Doing God’s Work – Why Bernie Matters for New York, America, and the World Nomi Prins. A pre-NY primary post, very well written and still germane.
Bernie Sanders: The Urgency of a Moral Economy: Reflections on the 25th Anniversary of Centesimus Annus. Prepared Remarks Inside the Vatican (Sid S)
Denying Discrimination: Clintonian Political Calculus and the Culture of Hooey Counterpunch
Sanders beat Trump in NY by over 200,000 votes Angry Bear
After New York Win, Clinton Campaign Says Sanders’ Attacks Help Republicans Mother Jones. Resilc: “But she IS a Republican.”
Lack of Household Income Gain Explains Trump & Sanders Appeal Barry Ritholtz
Trump Shakes Up Campaign as He Gets Serious About Winning Vanity Fair (furzy)
Why Trump abandoned his cheapskate campaign Christian Science Monitor
Top Trump Aide Lobbied for Pakistani Spy Front Yahoo News (furzy)
Obamacare
The Obamacare “Wonks” Are Awfully Selective about Which Taxes and Costs They See Marcy Wheeler
UnitedHealth Group to exit Obamacare exchanges in all but a ‘handful’ of states Washington Post
Criminal charges today in Flint water crisis Detroit Free Press
Leak worsens in massive Hanford tank holding nuclear waste KGW (Samuel A)
Six Years Later, Worried Gulf Residents to Hold Online Town Hall on BP Spill Health Impacts Truthout
Citing Losses, UnitedHealth to Pull Back From Obamacare New York Times. Death spiral continues.
Appeals Court Favors Transgender Student in Virginia Restroom Case New York Times
Gunz
Colorado school district to arm security staff with military-style rifles (+video) Christian Science Monitor
Lab Testing Reinvented YouTube. Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos. This WSJ comment that led me to the video:
Slav Rohlev
Do you like the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard? …then you’ll love the video below.
Her measured cadence (2 or 3 words per byte). Her Steve Jobs wannabe appearance. Her quest for profundity. All wrapped up in a dark background high tech production.
But what is really nauseating is her arrogance. The flunky lecturing the world on the future of medicine … all the time knowing that her non-functioning device was putting people in danger with faulty diagnoses.
Throw the book at her.
Intel Will Cut Up to 11% of Its Workforce, Says Revenue Came In Below Expectations Wall Street Journal
Goldman posts weakest results in four years, revenue tumbles 40 percent Reuters (martha r)
Blankfein’s Decade Is Ending With a Thud on a Humbled Wall Street Bloomberg
US HY default rate almost… back at its historical average FT Alphaville
Still Not Deleveraging American Homeowners Alan White, Credit Slips. From last week, still germane.
Class Warfare
From Verizon to McDonald’s, the Worker Strikes Back American Prospect
Uber has hit a road bump in its quest to conquer food delivery Business Insider
Antidote du jour (martha r):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
361 comments
Comments are closed.
New York republicans choose Donald Trump to be the next president, New York Democrats choose Trump as well.
I don’t wish to see Trump become President, but I do hope he destroys Hillary Clinton with every bit of opposition research dirt on her fully flung and every rock overturned. Take her down with every scandal and slimy innuendo available – even the boring true stuff if needed. If she wins, the impeachment proceedings begin Jan 21. US government will splinter and the pieces will spin away from each other and from the people. Maybe “fortress” Democrats will move the Exec branch capital away to NYC to distract public attention from the circus in DC – who knows? If Trump wins the farce of American democracy will meet its proper denouement in blood and chaos. I have backed Sanders w/ my vote+money, but it’s playing out as expected. Let the curtains fall. On the brighter side, soon we can stop all this tedious malarkey about reforming the Democratic Party from within.
that’s an upside, if clinton wins maybe some of the worst of her policies won’t go through, because republicans that would normally support war or trade deals may oppose them out of partisanship. looking for a silver lining, here.
I never thought I would be thankful for Republican obstructionism, but frankly the last six or so years have changed that. I see no reason to see that changing for a President Clinton.
No silver lining there. Republican are quite happy to vote with the Dems when it suits their agenda (fossil fuels, banking, war, etc).
that just means she would tack further and further right to appease them.
democrats are much better in opposition than they are in power. i don’t see a hil-ton presidency as the lesser evil no matter who the opponent.
As a Democrat, I share your sentiments entirely, even to the use of every slimey innuendo. I would like nothing better than to see the whole rotten system torn apart. It is hopelessly beyond repair.
As a Democrat.
Many people say that.
As a registered Democrat, it’s also said like that.
What does it mean, if any one (even noo Democrats) can just vote the party’s nominee?
Why register at all?
Should we just put every candidate’s name on one single ballot in November? Let the voter decide?
I think some people will think, wait a minute, we have 20 Democrats on the ballot and only 1 Republican. That’s split our votes.
“We only want one candidate on there.”
Then you have to have your own party members select one.
And you don’t want Republicans to pull dirty tricks to put the weakest one on it.
Instant runoff voting solves this problem nicely.
The right-wingers didn’t give up on conquering the Republican Party from within after the defeat of Goldwater. They kept working at conquering the party step by step until they got it conquered. It was a several-decades political-engineering project.
The liberadical left can think in the same long-term terms if they want to . . . and if they believe they can. A good first step might be adopting the right-winger attitude of no mercy and no prisoners and well targeted hatred properly used. Of course if the liberadical left are too pure and noble in their elevated moralitude to do that, then they are just too beautiful to live. And they will die off in due course.
I was never voting for the Clinton Dynasty anyways, but Sanders actually gave me something to vote for. I liked that. At least with Trump to vote for now, I can vote against the Clinton Dynasty without voting for any real whack job GOP fundamentalism economics or religion.
But Jeebus, didn’t that woman act like she was queen? Right from the beginning. Even in 2008, she was giving off the vibes of bloodline royalty. You watch if she gets in. You think the DINOs were bad to the liberals before?
Queen Hillary reminds me of the yuppie managerial women who made my workdays into a living hell. Loathsome people, every one of them
But, if you dared to criticize them in any way, uh-oh, you were being SEXIST!
Spot on comment. I had similar experiences
I’m tempted to vote for Clinton so those who identify as elite Dems get 4 years of what they deserve. Problem is they’d probably not realize what was going on, like the obots, who will soon be replaced by hillbots. Guess I’ll go with Stein instead.. Not gonna vote for either the bankers lackey or their customer/owner.
It gets addicting, this voting FOR rather than against something.
Don’t worry about Hillary. I suspect she’ll be too busy fending off impeachment charges for her emails to do much damage to the revolution coming.
Hillary Clinton: our last Oligarch President
How is self-proclaimed billionaire Trump not an oligarch, and what makes you think she’ll be the last if she grabs the brass ring?
I think the Sanders’ campaign has shown it’s possible, if
1. We persist
2 We prepare
3. We learn lessons from this year
4. More politicians read the polls
Will people register earlier the next time?
Will people not give up on only after this onne try? The rich will keep trying to pass their trade deals. The content we detest, but not the strategy, the commitment, the discipline.
The OverClass will try its hardest to hold the Republicans back from impeaching a President Clinton. The OverClass wants her in there to continue Obama’s work and preserve Obama’s legacy.
Perhaps the answer is to fill the Congress with a majority of Tea Party Republicans who hate the OverClass with a flaming passion and who might therefor disregard OverClass orders to leave a President Clinton unimpeached. Perhaps as part of that process, every Clintonite Obamacrat Democrat can be removed from Congress and replaced with Republicans until the only Democrats left will be liberadical “Red Gingriches” and legacy New Dealers for economic patriotism against Free Trade.
Unlikely as it now seems, please do not give up on a Sanders presidency just yet. Tho it will take something like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbrqFEJvY_g
Which actually happened. Just recently.
=)
So when HRC wins, we’ll never find out what the redacted 911 pages say about the Saudis, but we’ll finally know what fuzzy circumstantial evidence the government has been hiding for decades about space aliens.
Here is 100% proof civilization has <10 years to collapse:
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/04/19/fossils-fuels-could-be-phased-out-within-10-years
100% proof of what? Just because someone says that we can convert from fossil fuels in 10 years doesn’t mean it will happen. This is pure fantasy.
If you dont read the link and it’s reference before you post it, you degrade the experience here
If you actually did read them, then someone needs to buy you a clue.
Heres the CV of the suthor of the reference:
2006—Ph.D., Science and Technology Studies, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA.
2005—M.S./Graduate Certificates, Science Policy, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA.
2003—M.A., Rhetoric, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI.
2001—B.A., Philosophy and Communication Studies, John Carroll University, Cleveland, OH.
Academic experience
Is this the GradualSchool CV that represents the authority you are going to hang your hat on?
A PhD in Science and Technology Studies
An MA in Rhetoric?
Really?
This is some guy caught in the publish or perish academia paradigm trying to eek out a living, and BTW, good luck to him, I dont begrudge him that. But This doesn’t extrapolate to perpetuating the equivalent of freshman Rhetoric posing as fundemental research supporting a conclusion with a very dramatic timeline claim.
How long will it take? Conceptualizing the temporal dynamics of energy transitions ☆
The research paper title:
Really? Temporal dynamics of energy transitions?
Would you like dressing or some pepper with your Word Salad?
What is really needed is not open primaries but rather proportional representation. Open primaries are a band-aid that shunts people who have chosen not to be in a party momentarily into a party primary, when in reality their ideology is separate from that party. In NY open primaries would be a disaster when combined with fusion voting, as the major parties would be able to openly raid other party lines in gerrymandered districts. As a Green I shudder at this thought. That is why we need voting reform to allow more viable parties via proportional rep, not open primaries. The party put out a good statement on this: http://www.gpny.org/statement_from_the_green_party_of_ny_on_open_primaries_lawsuit_and_need_for_democratic_reform
Some excellent proposals, some seem like band-aids. Why “move the deadline for party affiliation changes”? Why not just send voters a personalized ballot and say: vote for whoever you want by this date?
“End partisan control of the Board of Elections and institute rigorous transparency to banish the patronage, unprofessionalism and incompetence resulting from the current system.” Sounds great, but more importantly, I would love to know how they advocate going about enacting these changes? It seems to me that they should have included links with each of these proposals showing how they might tangibly go about it.
And just for the sake of internet clarity, I’m not trying to be dismissive, I truly am interested in how to go about making this happen.
Seriously dude, thank god you are on this site. It’s tough enduring the capitalists on nakedcapitalism, with their contempt for solar energy and fiat money and love of gold, and don’t get those libertarians revved up. Yes to proportional voting. The entire narrative of democracy and empowerment coming from so called independents or worse yet, members of opposition parties voting in each others internal decision making is the formula for no power sharing at all. What you get is monkey wrenching interference, some sort of attempts at crippling the other side by making sure the weakest opposition candidate is in place against your strongest guy.
From the open letter of the Green Party USA on “open primaries”. …. “”Open” primaries only serve the short-term interests of unaffiliated voters at the expense of party members who spend time and energy building a fighting organization with a coherent platform and agenda. Should someone who is not a member of a union be allowed to vote for who will be the president of that union? Of course not: a fundamental element of the right to freely assemble is the ability to set reasonable criteria to establish who is a member and who is not.”
Apparently, the right to interfere in a membership organization by non-members is a new shibboleth of political freedom. And of course, the closed primary adherents are corrupt freedom killers, or something. The fact that political parties internal activities are not the same as public offices paid for by the citizens as a whole to conduct public business seems to be lost. And as the Green Party further points out, among many excellent points in the linked open letter, gerrymandering is more of a problem.
The fact that the majority of people can regularly outvote an opposition party, Gore nationally for president, or any congressional district custom made to win for minorities, such as in Pennsylvania, with 18 congressional districts, and 1 million more dems registered than reps and only 5 dems in congress, shows the weakness of democracy under gerrymandering and the need for proportional voting. If there is ever going to be power sharing, it has to be a structural feature of how the legislative bodies of state power are composed. And that begins in the ballot box for public office. Power sharing in “open primaries” is not power for control of the offices of power in government, but interfering in free assembly by diluting the ability of people to come together in like minded activism for specific policy goals, the party platform.
People registered as independents waste their so called independence by eventually voting for one of the 2 largest political parties, Ds or Rs, instead of joining another party, may I suggest the Green Party. Politics is not a solitary quest. It is building up social relationships to the point where you can get what you want out of life even in the face of organized opposition. Individualism as a political independent is perpetuating social alienation and political disenfranchisement. If you like the frustration that comes from political powerlessness, keep playing the “I’m a rugged individual, no party bosses tell me what to do” game. So you don’t want to be a D or an R, fine, but don’t pretend being all alone is independence from anything other than freedom from power.
NC known for its gold-buggery? Are you being sarcastic?
Anyway, good points about open vs. closed primaries. I think you can make reasonable arguments either way, though. On the one hand, yes, allowing non-members to participate in a “membership” organization’s internal dealings doesn’t seem justifiable. On the other hand, it is a fact of political life that we have a two party system, and since these two parties dictate who everyone will get to vote on, meaningful enfranchisement seems to require that everyone also get a say in who those nominees will be. Personally, I think everyone should be able to vote in BOTH primaries.
I don’t know that there’s a good argument to be made against proportional representation, though, and gerrymandering is just indefensible…hard to get rid of though, since neither side is going to agree to leave boundaries where they’re at if they aren’t the ones who drew them last.
I tried to join the Green Party here, but their organizing on the ground was just embarrassing. Also, they have the same attitude of “we’re right, everybody else is wrong and everything would be great if everyone just did what we said,” that turns me off of most political partisanship. I think we need to move away from the idea of parties all together, in favor or sortition with legislative votes determined by popular sentiment rather than the whims of the individual rep.
Thank you, diptherio, for putting it into words. I’ve had misgivings about the Greens for years.
My experience with the Greens was similar- the asses and elephants certainly don’t have a monopoly on corruption or incompetence.
I’m all for having no parties at all but publicly funded clean elections – that would go a long way towards getting the filthy lucre out of politics.
diptherio
April 20, 2016 at 11:30 am
I certainly agree that we should be able to vote in both primaries, and I would extend it to every party that appears on the primary ballot.
If I am a “green” voter, I should be able to vote for the candidate that I believe best exemplifies that philosophy in each party. Or, even more necessary, if I believe in financial reform (prosecuting criminals) I need a real choice, not both dems and republs coming up with excuses of why prosecutions are not feasible.
In Re Gold Bugs:
No, NC as a whole or even in part is not obsessed by bullion of the brain disease. Far from it, however, the long standing comments from the few hold outs of the sound money is money backed by gold have often reared their ugly head over the years and most recently in the past week or two. Gold as money is definitely debunked fast and hard on this site, but the fact that I have to see some of those comments here is painful. I have come here to learn and share what I know to be important in hope of making a contribution to the site. But, it is at best now a small bump on the road to level headed public policy that makes sense.
As far as political parties go, in reading the A. Hamilton bio by Ron Chernow, the development of partisanship is played out in the life of Hamilton as the golden boy of Washington’s military staff and then in the White House cabinet in Philadelphia as the Secretary of the Treasury. The ideological battles between Hamilton and Jefferson and the people they drew into the skirmishes to attack one another over policies and getting Washington’s blessing for their particular policy is the beginning of organized politics forming parties. What Chernow seems to draw out, is it is not so much bed rock ideas that drove the political differences exclusively, as much as the utter contempt Jefferson vs Hamilton and others, had for one another as people. Jefferson was more than willing to change from one ideal to another, if it hurt Hamilton and limited his influence and vice versa. Not much difference from Obama getting his brains beaten in from before he was even sworn in by the Rs in DC, even when he pursued clearly republican developed legislation, such as the ACA.
The alternative to presenting a coherent set of policies other than the vehicle of political parties escapes me, and I don’t mean by a failure of vision or thinking about possibilities. A group of people coming together in a formal organization to advance their ideas is a political party by any name. I really don’t what else is going to replace collective action by people other than collective action. Call it a party or some internet based algorithm for public policy by the public at large, there will still be some rules and regulations governing the behavior of people in the political decision making process, and that form will be a political party, even if it does NOT behave the way formal organizations behave today in 2016.
Non-affiliated Cali voter here. Being no party makes the most sense for me. I can still vote in Dem primary whereas I could not if I was Green. I left the D party not to be a rugged individualist but because they proved over and over and over and over that when given the reins of power, they behaved only ever so slightly less bad than the Republicans. It used to be the party of FDR and the working class and people who cared about others (at least so the history books say; and there were remnants of this still in my youth, I remember in 88 not being able to decide between Jesse Jackson’s best-for-the-people campaign & Al Gore’s best for the environment campaign until the poll workers stood outside the curtain and told me I needed to hurry) but it has become a party of & for pro-status quo rich moderates who are fine with war profiteering & environmental destruction as long as it lines the pocket books of the rich, and worse, it has become a party that claims to be the former while actually being the latter, and actively working to hinder efforts to improve things. I’d only join to reform or destroy it if couldn’t be reformed. If I stood too long in a room with these people I’d probably be getting arrested shortly after I left. Leaving the party was the best option available to express my disgust. Ok, the best legal option.
As I’ve been saying on twitter, either we take it back or burn it down. Currrent DNC leadership a greater obstacle to progress than the RNC, who at least are more or less upfront about what they stand for. The Dems lead people to the same slaughter (albeit they manage t)he journey much more competently while pretending to lead us to better times. I’d rather deal with the upfront evil. And being a Dem would not empower me or lessen my frustration at the rampant cheating in this election, or the pro-oligarchy bent of the Dem Party.
Right now, I’m still planning on Bernie winning, and even if he needs to win the last day 75-25 to win pledged delegates I’m still gonna be trying (& then there’s the whole pro-HRC election fraud/voter suprression/infiltration etc that seems to be rampant even in states where he wins. Without this I suspect he’d be ahead now & race would have a whole different dynamic, and the MSMs pro HRC propoaganda efforts would all be for naught).
The urge to sabotage the other party candidates isn’t so strong when you run people that people actually have some enthusiasm to vote for (like Sanders). Sanders enthusiasts aren’t engaged in strategizing about Trump and Cruz so long as they can actually vote Sanders. If you want people to vote FOR something THEN GIVE THEM SOMETHING TO VOTE FOR!!!
Of course if the parties just keep running warmed over sewage, well don’t be surprised if people find it more useful to engage in game theory games about conquering the other party, than getting excited about warmed over sewage.
I normally enjoy your comments Mr. T and you did make some valid points in your post, but your argument concerning closed primaries is pure strawman. Hillary Clinton isn’t running to be the chairwoman of the DNC, that’s Wasserman-Schultz’s job title. Hillary is running to be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. The primaries are like the semi-finals of a two round sports tournament for President. All of the tax payers in New York State pay for elections, including the primaries so they all should get to vote if they want. Everyone in New York is affected by the laws and policies of elected officials so they should be allowed to vote regardless of party affliation. The DNC isn’t anything like a union or knitting club and I’m sure you already know this. A closed primary in a state like New York with a single dominant party is a fig leaf for massive voter suppression and disenfranchisement by established elites.
Perhaps what we need is to count the vote of everyone that chooses to vote. Doing opposite as we have seen in 3 or more states guarantees futher disenfranchisement from every state by a D or an R.
I wonder which will come first, anarchy or democracy?
I remember arguing over the years about how anti democratic the electoral college was. Than we go through the nonsense of Florida, and the whole discussion, almost designed as propaganda, to deflect the fact that GORE INDISPUTABLY won the most votes in the country.
Now, philosophically, one can debate the short comings of democracy and “mob” rule and so forth. As a practical matter, it shows how little sway the will of the people have upon government policy…
I would add that in a real democracy, the fact the people might change, evolve, which means people might be against things that they were for earlier, is recognized.
Voting every 4 years lock voters in for that period.
There are other alternatives.
Will they ever get to the bottom of the NY campaign irregularities? What about Arizona? Certainly has the appearance of some Camp Clinton dirty tricks. The peoples’ names just magically disappeared off the rolls? Could a hacker do this? Was it “magically” mainly Bernie supporters affected?
Of course not. Why would they, it only exposes their corruption? Apparently deBlasio was ‘surprised by the number”… as though he was expecting this but not that many purges.
Rest assured, there will be a full investigation. No stone will be left unturned to get at the root of this abject failure of our voting system. The notion that ANY BODY was able to vote for Bernie at all is an abomination that shall not stand. /S
Oh yes, there will be investigations, court hearings. And ten years down the line, only then will the Judges express their outrage at the overt corruption they have seen. But by then it won’t’ mater any more. Honestly, the courts are nearly as corrupt as the party and legislature. The problem is that these “voting irregularities” are features, not bugs.
Your forgot to add pardoning the culprits in the interest of national unity.
The infuriating and unacceptable fact of life in Realpolitik (the form of politics that currently exists) is that winning is all that matters.
Rounding down the estimated 3.2 million Independents in New York to 3 million and assuming 60% voted for Sanders…
Even if only half of them turned out Sanders still would have won 50.2% to 49.8%
(totals based on 98% reported in)
And that is only looking at ONE of the voting issues from yesterday, but let’s all celebrate Democracy… and call for Sanders to drop out.
Sanders didn’t need to win NY to have dented Clinton. Anything tighter than 54% to 46% would have been a sign of weakness, given her long political history in general and in NY in particular.
Definitely. Any amount of actual open, legitimate voting would have been beneficial.
I believe she beat him with early voting again. I think i saw that somewhere. On election day the votes were neck-and-neck, hence the gap between exit polls and final numbers. This is why voter suppression works for her. She’s already got a lead when the polls open, so the point isn’t to selectively protect her by squeezing his favorable spots, but, it’s to protect her early voting lead by squeezing turnout down.
Nope, there is no early voting in NY. He probably lost some votes upstate because the polls were closed from 6 am to noon. And certainly he lost some votes from the party switches and the roll purges, but unfortunately apparently NY is stupid. Mind you the Republican results bear that out as well.
I should also note that the only areas of upstate NY that are not suburban NYC Clinton carried were also the more urban ones with Syracuse and Rochester and Buffalo. (I’m really shocked that Rochester was stupid enough to go there, her trade and fracking flip flopping alone should have killed her there.)
There are plenty of erm…comfortable people in the suburbs of Rochester(Fairport, Penfield, Pittsford, Mendon, Webster, etc). I am not surprised in the least. They got theirs. And, they tend to be on the more conservative side of the D party range. They dislike Bernie Sanders/left wing types that want to upset the apple cart. Have had a few tussles with them over the past month. There’s a reason I got out and I’ll never move back.
They see Sanders supporters as “whiny kids that cry conspiracy at every point when they aren’t getting what they want”. Monroe County is pretty well-off compared to the surrounding counties.
Fair enough, and since the state has backed off fracking they didn’t have to care about her real stance on that – despite the fact that they should care as national policy could end up screwing them on that.
I really wish auto correct would not decide I was talking about ‘tracking’.
Monroe County and the other urban/suburban areas wouldn’t have given a rat’s about fracking. It wouldn’t have affected them. Now, the people in the southern tier and rural areas, sure.
New York doesn’t have early voting.
My bad….sorry. Thanks for the correction.
But does NY have absentee ballots? Assuming so, how strict are the requirements to obtain one, esp. to be “permanent” absentee ballot. That’s more or less the same thing as early voting in that it allows you to vote early and without having to go to a polling place. (Although in many states like mine, early voting is not just by mail but at selected locations like libraries.)
Sorry, my bad. Thanks for the correction!
I was prepared for disappointment when I discovered how many of the enthusiastic young Berners I was meeting at rallies and marches the past couple of weeks weren’t registered Democrats in NY. They weren’t thinking about yesterday’s primary back in October, when they would have had to switch their registration.
At least my hometown of Ithaca turned out strong for Bernie!
http://www.vox.com/2016/4/19/11448930/bernie-sanders-ithaca-new-york
Simples: NY was a very closed DNC primary.
Sanders most likely would have won if independents and late registerers could have voted.
Despite losing he is still the stronger candidate!
Despite losing he is still the stronger candidate!
Uhhhn no. The person who wins is the stronger candidate. Politics is all about winning. You can lose gracefully all you want but that doesn’t make you a winner.
I am not “with her” and there is a zero possibility that I will ever vote for her for any office, but her win last night was pretty impressive. She beat Sanders like a drum. I am afraid that the same thing will happen next week in PA, CT and MD – they are all closed primaries. I don’t understand the whining about not being able to vote in the D primary unless you are registered as a Democrat. Did you not know this before? They told me this 40 years ago when I went to register to vote in PA for the first time. Pick one or the other or you won’t have a voice in the primaries. You have to know the rules of the game if you want to win.
Isn’t the stronger candidate the one who has a better chance of winning in the general election? I have trouble believing that Hillary Clinton can win in November; there are too many skeletons in her closet, and the Republicans will expose them mercilessly. I doubt that Bernie Sanders has a closet full of bones just waiting for Republicans to start gnawing on them.
And I have trouble believing that an indictment won’t be forthcoming. After all, the FBI is doing a pretty thorough investigation.
What I can’t understand is why (rich) people are putting down money if they believe an indictment is coming?
They don’t. But then they are also in deep denial about how a Republican House will treat Clinton (it will make the last six years look like they were strewing flowers in Obama’s path). And the even bigger problem that her lack of real coat tails is going to make a Democratic Senate a long shot. That is important because when the House impeaches her (and they will), the only thing keeping her from being the second President convicted after being impeached will be if Democrats hold the majority. That she will be the second Clinton impeached will also be historic, but personally that is a bit of history I could gladly miss.
You see, even if they are right about the FBI and the DOJ indicting her, they are going to be wrong about it disappearing. Well the mishandling of classified documents or any number of other illegal actions.
And for people who think that material has to be marked classified to be considered classified or that mishandling it is nothing. They might want to ask the guy who got a fine and probation for his handling of files regarding his military service in Afghanistan. Somehow I don’t see a Republican Congress defaulting to fines and probation rather than the year in prison.
Maybe you’re right that we’re in deep denial about an indictment coming.
As for Republicans, she’s a Republican.
And Bill will advise her on how to survive an impeachment.
Oh, she might skate by. He only got by because there were no Democratic votes for removal and it takes 2/3rds of the Senate to remove a President from office. The real question will be who will be facing reelection in 2018 or 2020. Unlike Bill, her high negatives and (my assumed) lack of coat tails does not bode as well for party loyalty if the public is over it.
Protection money.
If they DON’T put some money on Clinton while storm clouds gather around her,
AND she somehow is not indicted or otherwise pushed out of the race,
AND she is elected to the White House,
they’re gonna be on her permanent Shit List with no way off it.
It’s just pocket change to them, pocket change which keeps their seat at the table for Washington corruption.
With pocket change like that, they (the rich people) should place more bets (secretly to avoid her wrath, of course) elsewhere.
Maybe who gets in is not important to them.
Why did Sheldon Adelson fund Newt Gingrich for so long? Money doesn’t equate to rational behavior. Mittens received flak for his 47% comments, but the rest of the video is more revealing. Those donors barely knew what day of the week it was. Their basic message to Mittens was, “everyone I know loves you, why aren’t you doing better in the ghetto? Have you told poor people to find more hours in the day?” It was crazy stuff.
Mittens was simply the smartest person outside of the video taper in the room. As hard as that is to believe.
The other problem is people of all races and creeds always seem amazed a politician is likable in person. Many if these donors have met Bill and Hillary and stared into their souls and found they liked them. I bet Hillary is friendly. She had a great cameo on “Broad City.” Hell, Blake Griffin had a great cameo, and I can’t think of an NBA player I despise more than Griffin who isn’t actively on the Lakers roster. If Hillary tells donor X, everything is okay, everything becomes okay because their friend said it was okay. Isn’t it cool to be pals with the President? How many people went to a Sanders rally and were simply impressed by the crowd? I’m sure Hillary is taking money from friends in industries she has no intentions of helping. I don’t like her, but Hillary is a natural politician. People like her in person, and and if you weren’t in her way or collateral damage, I bet she’s great.
As far as the election goes, you are correct. But if you take a broader view regarding activism in general, than I think NoOne’s comment is closer to the truth.
1. We now know more about how the game is rigged in NY. The next ground game can learn from this and begin compensating.
2. These kinds of victories for Clinton produce benefits for the short term, but cost her more in the long term. California is already getting the message and looking at the coming primary with new eyes and asking harder questions.
3. Even if Bernie loses the nomination in the end, it will be the end of only one battle, but this war is only heating up. Bernie might be able to do more damage to the establishment on the outside than if he was President. Howderd Dean’s 50 state strategy when he was in charge of the DNC comes to mind.
Methinks that the political revolution has just begun. And let’s just say that HRC won’t be among its winners.
Even if she wins the November election, it will be a hollow victory at best.
It’s not hard.
One way is that it merely takes a sharp politician as ‘skillful’ as Bill Clinton in his 40’s to seize the same message to complete the revolution.
Let’s hope he/she is genuine and not simply playing Realpolitik.
If there is one encouraging lesson from this year, it’s that how easy this can be done.
But the revolutionaries have to prepare years ahead, have discipline and have a better name – maybe the People’s Revolutionary Democratic Party.
Agreed. I hope Sanders wins, but if he doesn’t then the day he concedes should be day 1 of Sanders in 2020. Or a designated successor with the same platform, if he decides not to give it another go. If there is appetite for change now, think about how people will feel after four more years of neoliberalism.
We are also overdue for another financial crisis, given that it’s been nearly ten years since the last one and none of the underlying structural problems have been fixed. It will be interesting to see how HRC handles it if she is in power at the time. Ten to one says: bankers will be made whole at the expense of the middle and working classes, TBTF will be further entrenched, and inequality will increase even further. Think about that as a possible backdrop for 2020 and imagine what we might see.
No designated successors.
Let whoever is (could be more than just one, and we could use candidates at all levels) most qualified lead.
Someone, or multiple someones, still need to decide who is most qualified. The primary would be one way of answering that question, but possibly not the best way unless you want multiple candidates on a Sanders platform going against a single anointed neoliberal successor, or HRC again.
California is quite abit different than the NY Primary. “Independent” voters can vote in the Democratic Primary, registering to vote can occur into late April. (Primary election is June 7.)
The optics of Bernie Rallies in CA will be must see TV. The LATimes has an editorial in today’s paper quoting Yogi: “It ain’t over ’til it’s over.” Californians are relishing a Primary that matters.
If Bernie can stay close back East, then CA and Oregon will give him a good finishing kick. Win or lose the Demo Convention is going to have to deal with Bernie. Otherwise turnout will be historically low and down-ticket D’s will be slaughtered.
Colonel Lang at Sic Semper Tyrannis has run some occasional posts on the Clinton emails deal. In one of those posts he wrote that the detail in the material leaked suggested to him that it was ground-level law-enforcement-operatives behind that leak because they wanted some information to get out and they did not/ do not trust the political and judicial higher-ups to do anything about the email affair, no matter how criminal it is discovered to be.
If he is correct about that, then when the establishment decides not to prosecute or even take any disciplinary actions or even issue mild admonishments, then various law enforcement operatives will begin leaking as close to everything as they can figure out how to leak. That’s just my guess.
My other guess is that Clinton will never be prosecuted or chastised or anything by any establishment figure for any of this. To paraphrase Leona Helmsley: ” Only the little people obey laws.”
I have read there are about 3,000,000 NY voters registered as independents. Assuming that is close to being true and that 33% of them would have voted (the participation rate yesterday) that is another 900,000, or so voters. Democrats received 66% of the total vote, so that would mean another 600,000 or so Democratic leaning voters. Exit polls of open primaries in Wisconsin and Michigan show Sanders getting close to 70% of the independent voters who made up 27% of the total voters.
Without being too fine on calculations, an argument can be made that if NY is like other states with independent voters, Hillary might still have won, but with only 53%-53% of the vote. All of a sudden what looks like a huge victory1 becomes very close.
at this point, i don’t know how much of her victory in new york was due to her being a stronger candidate, and how much was due to political games and outright fraud. the complaints about shortened polling hours and voter registrations being switched aren’t whining.
On an absolute scale, it was probably not that impressive.
But relatively speaking, for the professionals in that industry, my guess is they are impressed…comparable to Nixon, Bush and other all time greats…all men. So, now, a woman can right that injustice.
Only problem is that in a general you have to win both your party AND the independents. While there is a good chance she could win NY without the independents against a Trump, can she win in Ohio OR PA?
And not for nothing, having to change your registration status six months before an election is beyond closed.
Hillary’s real problem is enthusiasm and registration. The latest deadlines are mid-October. The average voter starts to pay attention in late October. Will David Brock or the walker brigade stand for hours in the Summer sun at grocery stores asking about registration? The last registration drive was in 2012. Every change of address is a potential lost vote. Then GOTV and absentee ballots are issues as well.
This Is the kind of issue which can flip a state.
Why should the law allow taxpayer-funded elections of private party candidates? If parties want a closed process, let them fund it. If they want public primaries to establish legitimacy, we should insist that they be open to all.
Exactly, Greg. And, yes, I do have a dawg in this fight. I’m an Independent who doesn’t like being disenfranchised.
Should taxpayer funded elections allow voters in one county to vote in another county or another state (federal money)?
Should campaigns using public-financing open their files to the public? Or let public attend their meetings?
Should students be able to attend any public schools, anywhere they choose? Instead of getting lucky by being born into a family rich enough to afford a house in the desirable district?
If a primary is funded by taxpayers, why can an Independent be on the ballot? We say an independent voter can vote in that primary, either open-open, or with last minute switching to become a member of that party. But not the candidates.
Can a Democratic candidate (or an Independent candidate switching to become a Democrat) get on the ballot at the last minute? Why not? We advocate last minute party registration for voters.
MyLessThanPrimeBeef- sounds like you may not fully agree with stronger government rules allowing open primary elections. As I understand your points – you are asking whether technological and other primary election constraints make rule changes unwise. Voting in other districts, public school choice and ballot access presently have such constraints. I don’t see similar constraints that prohibit open primary elections.
For most of the questions you raise, the state who has the gold should make the rules. Voting should be a right that does not depend on good behavior, prior voting, or other conditions. Registration should be automatic and universal starting with your first ID or license at 16-18. Change of postal addresses should automatically re-register you in a new district and could relatively easily result in nearly universal registration. An update to the voting rights act could make this happen – an example of the state making the rules (good rules IMO.) This might even become a popular enough to happen within a decade.
The technological constraints for voting on election day using equipment in other precincts/districts is not insurmountable – but for now, that’s one reason why we have the rules we have.
In North Carolina, we allow some limited choices of public schools which were previously integrated through busing. Public school choice largely re-segregated the schools. Those are the rules the state made to improve outcomes for those born in undesirable districts – perhaps someday we’ll get better. If these rules are unacceptable to the feds, they can withhold funding until we get with their program or they can pass laws to force us to do better. State gold making rules.
Political parties are rapidly declining in popularity. At this point, they can be given a choice – either:
1. privately nominate a candidate who can access the general election ballot and risk alienating independent voters, or
2. use public primary elections with rules that allow non-party voters and candidates to influence the process in ways that party members may deem undesirable.
I have no problems with states holding “open-open” primaries as long as parties aren’t obligated to use them. If virtually everyone were associated with a political party, perhaps some case could be made for closed primaries. They are an anachronism in today’s environment.
This is another thing about American school funding that has always baffled me. Schools are funded by local property taxes, so poor neighbourhoods get poor schools, and rich neighbourhoods get rich schools. Is there some constitutional thing that makes this so? Shouldn’t schools be funded at the federal, or at least state, level, with a federal ruling on standards?
A federal ruling on standards opens the door for OverClass infiltrators to decide on what the federal standards are to be. In a “federal standards” environment, Gates and Google and etc. can figure out how to write the standards in such a way as to demand and require hundreds of billions of dollars of purchases of Gates equipment and programs and Google services and etc.
Politics is all about winning.
Uh no. It might be if we had anything remotely resembling a fair representation but when the vote is for far right and right sided politics that have rigged the game so that anyone even vaguely resembling the left can’t play then you don’t get to tell me it’s all about “winning.”
For Bernie to get into the game to play is an inspiring thing and a win. Hopefully every single person who has heard him speak pushes long after Clinton and the DNC have done their very best to push him out of the conversation.
I hope every single person who votes for him remembers how it feels to vote FOR someone, rather than against and continues to push towards REAL representative government.
Realpolitik is all about winning.
And winners get to write history.
It was wrong to take a whole continent from Native Americans…because it was ’empty.’
Today, we apologize, but no reparations, much less returning the home you paid off, by working hard the last 30 years, to Native Americans.
We have to ‘look forward.’
And try to get along.
And we have to ‘know the real history.’
But we keep our homes.
We don’t re-do history.
No practical way.
And it’s so infuriating and makes one mad.
Let’s all get along.
In the PRIMARY. In the general, Hillary is the weaker candidate because she cannot prevent Independents and every other stripe of voter from voting. Winning a primary is nothing like winning the general. Bernie IS the stronger candidate in the general, when ALL voters matter.
The final NY delegate count was 139 Clinton and 106 Sanders.
Pretty good :)
– Citing Losses, UnitedHealth to Pull Back From Obamacare
“Without large numbers of customers, insurers are unable to demand low prices from hospitals and doctors.”
So the ROI on lobbying money to get the ACA passed is negative. I believe that is called a perverse consequence. Lest we forget, UnitedHealth would pocket any gains, not pass them on the the victims. Sorry, customers.
Single payer tautologically presents the largest bloc for bargaining with providers. I am sick of my body being a bargaining chip for rentiers. Lucky enough to be healthy, and working to stay that way. Sick of the crapifination.
Well, yes, so single payer, which is *all* the customers, can demand low prices? So, what’s the holdup? Because socialism? Because common sense?
According to the Wapo link, UnitedHealth Group is “the nation’s largest insurer.”
So where does this “without large numbers of customers” stuff come from? Same for the inability to “demand low prices from hospitals and doctors.” As “the nation’s largest insurer,” they’ve already successfully done the “demanding.”
Just fold the exchange insureds in with the rest, use the same payment schedules already negotiated, and quit whining about the fact that when your business is selling “healthcare,” some of your customers might actually need it.
+1000
Question: Does PPACA (Obamacare) premium controls incentivize insurance companies to push up medical fees?
This may sound counter-intuitive at first, but I’ve seen a similar problem under the old scheme of control for public utilities in Hong Kong which limited profit to a % of cost, so cost spiraled out of control. (When the policy was change to profit as a % of fixed capital, the floor of the turbine hall at Castle Peak B was laid down in Marble.)
When I heard that PPACA sets a profit limit of (ie: 80-85% of premiums must be spent on medical costs), I began to wonder. Under this system the only way to increase the gross income would be to increase the premiums by increasing the amount spent on medical costs. ie: 20% of 10,000 is a lot less than 20% of 100,000. In theory competition would limit this by putting pressure on premium rates. However, most markets there are only one or two insurance vendors, and if in-network doctors, ie: combines/firms of doctors who are willing to deal with the paperwork are shared, then it’s unlikely they will have much difference in rates and as long as the prices don’t shoot up too fast, little incentive to expend costs trying to shop down the price.
Further, because PPACA uses the 2nd cheapest sliver policy to set subsidy rates, and subsidized buyers remain the biggest part of the market, there is less pressure from these buyers on the total premium costs. Then if there are only two or three vendors, they all have a great incentive to keep pushing up costs to the industry as a whole, which will keep the two/three vendors in range of each other, and also would prevent any upstart from coming in later when they have inflated prices. Until the government begins to squeal and balk at the costs of subsides, the only possible constraint might be that comparisons with rates medical service vendors give to Non-PPACA insurance, primarily employee provide insurance.
The recent news that the Justice Dept is considering allowing consolidation of the already shrinking pool of PPACA insurance vendors would make gaming the government subsidy just that much more interesting for both the insurance companies (and their holding companies, who spotting the fix could invest in medical services vendors, a trend which seems to be growing).
I’m sure there is something wrong with this model, and hope someone here will point out my error.
Note that profit “limit” is absurdly rich. In the 1990s, health insurers spent 90% of premiums on medical costs, and before Obamacare, 85%. So allowing them to go to 80% massively fattens their permissible margins. Nicely played.
The problem is the subsides don’t cover people who are mildly affluent and up, and health generally is better among higher income people, so fixing the subsidies does not do anything to encourage the ones who have opted out (a high % in that cohort) to come back in.
Any idea what % of the market isn’t subsidized? From the few media items I’ve read, it seems that at least a plurality of buyers are subsidized,
Found old news in the NYT, from about 1 year ago, that indicates 86% of buyers on PPACA exchanges get subsides. The data on the amount of subsidy isn’t presented as clearly, but if true it gives some credence that the gaming of the tax payer (ie: the 99%) by the market could lead to very high procedure costs as a way to boost insurance profits (as well as investments in service providers by insurance companies investment arms), both gain by the gaming.
In HK an out-patient colonoscopy costs about HK$5800- (US$ 750.00) for non-permanent residents, IE not covered by the government’s social medicine (expats, medical tourist, etc). I recall reading in a comment on NC where a USA woman’s co-pay alone was US$3000. If this antidote is for representative, it would indicate there is a forcing function to push up medical costs.
Again, one suspects the hue and cry about the poor profits in the market and signals of withdraw might be part of a PR campaign to overcome anti-trust barriers to merger, that vast profits are being hidden from view, at least until the deed is done.
There are LOTS of loopholes in the Medical Loss Ratio requirements of the ACA. Suffice it to say, insurers can dump a crapload of costs into that 80-85% bucket that no sane person would regard as providing or improving health care.
Mr/Ms Shop, I do not understand your reference, “When the policy was change to profit as a % of fixed capital, the floor of the turbine hall at Castle Peak B was laid down in Marble.)”. Can you please elucidate, esp “the floor of the turbine hall at Castle Peak B was laid down in Marble”? I am pretty sure it is important, I just don’t know what it means. Umm, sorry, umm.
It means exactly what it says, trying to read between the lines will just get you confused.
wiki- Castle peak B is the largest coal fired power plant in Hong Kong, laying marble on the floor is expensive and since profit is a % of fixed capital, the marble floor allows for more profit…what I don’t know is if it’s snark, or if they actually put in a marble floor in the turbine hall….enquiring minds want to know!
It means exactly what it says.
I think it means that the accounting change enabled, or even encouraged, the Hong Kong utility to spend more on luxuries.
What it means is that marble was laid on the floor of the building, to vastly increase the value of that building, and when profit is set as a percentage of that value, absolute profit is vastly increased.
Nothing to do with productivity. Everything to do with scam. Just like health insurance.
Why are there never any price lists for different procedures posted near a hospital entrance?
Is it to prevent heart attacks, until after the invoice is presented? Thereby generating even more revenue.
Thank you, cnchal.
I’m going to comment outside of your model – everything that makes the Swiss model of health care work in Switzerland was jettisoned when the insurance lobby wrote the final bill for ACA. First off the insurance companies should not be negotiating with the doctors/hospitals/drug companies regarding the charges. Those should be set and be the same regardless of who is paying. Secondly the insurance companies should be required to have exchange plans in order to operate at all. And thirdly the limits on deductibles and out of pocket maximums should never have been allowed to be so high.
But you see the problem is that this was not about Americans actually getting health care, it was about Americans having insurance. And the insurance companies in their greed and the Obama administration in their stupidity took an already expensive system and made it so that people bought expensive insurance and then would only choose to use it for catastrophic and significant medical emergencies as they could not afford to use it otherwise. Funny how that is not working out so well. The insurance companies aren’t getting the complete windfall they expected (beyond the Medicaid expansion) and Americans largely have less access to real health care than they had before ACA.
“But you see the problem is that this was not about Americans actually getting health care, it was about Americans having insurance.”
I agree with the first part of your sentence, but not the second. It was about fraudulently extracting wealth from an entire population to enrich players at each level of a fabulously wealthy pyramid scheme (lots of “middle men” on the way to insurance company executive suites) that winds through Congress and stretches all the way to Oval Office.
This is the neoliberal project.
Fair enough. I was not giving enough credit to the long line of grifters beyond the investors and the executive boards (present and future) of Insurance/Pharma/Private Medical industries.
Who could have known that making the deductible almost a month’s worth of income for someone making median wage would go badly? That isn’t including the fact that so many things aren’t included in that deductible. It’s pretty sad when you have kidney stones and you’re dreading having to go to the doctor because you know that you are going to have to pay around $250 for the CT and another $250 for the doctor’s who will read the CT. That’s isn’t including the fact that if they find blood in my urine that they’ll be using a catheter to figure out if the blood is coming from my kidneys or uterus which was last charged as outpatient surgery-another $250. Essentially just one visit is going to cost me almost a week’s pay.
Is it any wonder that at this point I’m just choosing hydration and hoping that whatever stone is mucking things up isn’t large like the one in 2000 and doesn’t muck things up too much like the one in 2005?
Protip from an older guy: Mix a glass of hot water with a few tbsp of lemon juice. sweeten to taste. drink 2x a day and those stones will go away. Very old trick, the citrus dissolves them.
Stupid? They knew exactly what they were doing – what we have is exactly what they wanted.
Look at all the evidence – excluding single-payer, the public option misdirection, etc, etc.
There, fixed it for you :). Otherwise, astutely observed. Thanks.
Obama didn’t do it out of “stupidity”. Obama did it out of greed. He was/ is greedy for the hundreds of millions of dollars of personal rewards and gifts he expects from Big Insura in return for this standing bailout he engineered for Big Insura. He knew exactly what he was doing, and why.
He hopes to become America’s first billionaire ex-President.
great summary of what happened, thanks.
Leak worsens in massive Hanford tank holding nuclear waste
One thing that seriously irritates me the most about Hanford is that nearly 100% of that facility was for handing Military Nuclear Waste, mostly from the Nuclear Weapons Program, but it’s the civilian DOE that pays for it. Just another dodge for the DOD, who control all the MIC related vendors who work on the program, while the DOE pays most of the bills. The money to fix Hanford should be gotten out of the filthy rich DOD so we can see where our money is really being spent.
DOE, NASA, FAA, Dept. of Labor, and many other government departments subsidize the DOD so that the actual insane slice of the budget that goes to military spending is far larger than it seems.
What irritates me is that nobody pays to actually provide a solution. Tanks leaking next the Columbia River have been a known problem for decades. IIRC, there was a cleanup mandated long ago that was never performed.
If I may riff, the deep reason I hate (repeat hate) the Clinton cohort is that I was a half-year out of a Masters Degree in Environmental Science when Slick cut the EPA budget by about a third. First, this decreased the ability of the EPA to perform its regulatory duty. It also dumped seasoned professionals onto the market right when my fresh face was poised for the front window. And the jobs available were from industry looking to skirt regulations, which was in direct competition with the ability of the EPA to perform its duty.
That hatred goes beyond the $40k that made me an early entry in the student loan lifetime invasive procedure protocols. At that time the two primary known environmental threats were depletion of the ozone layer and global warming. CFC’s were banned and ozone depletion at least managed. But that was a more tractable problem, and right at the point that leadership still had a chance to impact the systemic problem of global warming, Clinton personally undercut the ability of the environmental movement to work within the system, and gave aid to the entities which profited at exacerbating the problem. The Federal crapification flowed downstream and the NGO’s started getting infected as well, for example turning The Nature Conservancy into an arm of Goldman-Sachs, using funding to take over leadership.
I acknowledge my bias, but it is true when I say, that I believe Clinton bears more responsibility than any other individual on our planet for destabilizing our global climate.
The DOE, never the best organ in the first place, is forced to work with MIC contractors, the fellows who never finalize a design as a business practice, and whom actually report to the DOD. This whole mess of conflicts of interest, hazy lines of liability and authority, and out right corruption has kept Hanford unsafe. What that news report failed to mention is nearly all those contractors are merely shell companies, nearly all when chased through the shareholding tree of tax shelters, nearly all are owned fully or in the majority by Dick Chenny’s Halliburton.
So, between Fukishima and Hanford……what are the odds of dodging cancer in PNW?
Slim to none? And I live close enough to be affected. Not good. But hey, we have ObamaCare, so all is well, right? /s
With Hanford the toxicity will kill you first, mostly those toxins that would be available via inhalation. ingesting them isn’t much more harmful that most junk food(ie: they’ll shorten your life span, but you’ll never finger them (or Frito Lays) for it); the digestive system pretty good at passing off harmful inorganic salts, arsenic and cesium being the most notable exception, and even there it takes pretty large doses. Also, the radioactivity in those tanks is relatively low, minuscule compared to inside the failed containment at Fukushima.
This is why the large tanks don’t have any shielding. However the witches brew of chemicals in a vapor state is pretty close to nerve gas in toxicity. The lungs have almost no barrier to absorption of most toxins. So, don’t be down wind of Hanford by a few hundred miles if they have a brush fire that might burn off some spills or a tank farm fire.
BTW, DuPont’s probably already given you cancer, it’s just going to take 5-15 years to show up. We should have stuck to cast iron skillets…
I always did stick to cast iron skillets. Or stainless steel ones. And its not too late for people with teflon skillets to go back to cast iron ones. And eat the kind of shinola food which confers cancer resistance and cancer suppression upon those who eat it.
The DOD should be included to provide whatever expertise it has. We know it asked Congress for extra pay for nuclear cleanup operations after Fukushima – that’s how we know our military was over there trying to prevent the worst, and probably still is. All this has never been revealed tho’. The only press release was a blurb recently that the ships used in the Fuku cleanup were now “mildly radioactive”. We also know that the DOE was so concerned about all the leaks (for decades) at Hanford that they asked for bids, one was from Bechtel who finally told them that there was really no way to clean the toxic mess up. For this advice I’m sure they paid multi millions. There is a way to save the river water that nobody talks about. Divert the Columbia R. away from Hanford. And create a separate path of least resistance for the radioactive sludge to follow, like down a very deep hole.
The Department of Energy owns all nuclear weapons. They are merely on loan to the military.
I know that NASA owned/owns the Atlas Ballistic Missiles (and re-used some of them as launch vehicles when they were retired), but I can’t find data on who owns the Minutemen. My guess is it would be the same. It’s insane how much of the wealth get’s eaten up by the military and MIC.
Don’t forget all of the private companies (GE, Boeing, Rockwell, Fluor, etc.) that have been slurping too.
A quick quiry, this floated through my page. It stated that due to Sanders wins through most of the counties within NY will mean that the delegate math will be much more in Sanders favor. As such Hillary may only win 15 or potentially less delegates.
She gets 80 delegates just for winning the state.
Isn’t it cute that her bonus prize is worth more than some states are allotted as a share of the delegates?
Branching Out
Is one of Natures Laws I
fear to break
What does she expect
of me when the branch ends?
I spend most of my Caterpillar life
backing up an down an too
often squinching up so tight
I kiss my own peep hole
Lets not even recall the pain
of stretching so far my peep
hole disappears…
And where is the Law that
drafts me Bait? Nature knows
I don’t swim so why do I go
eye to eye with wall eye?
Like I said I spend a lot of
my short Life appeasing Nature
No matter my state of
mind the more I branch the
more my journey is exposed
The tale that survives me
proclaims a great ending in flight
Well if the ‘Branching’ does not
end me I can only imagine
the obstacles with Flying
And yet I sense therein lies the
draconian nature for Natures Law…
Always Always
Strive to Endure
Your ‘Branching Out’
least You waste lessons
Surviving the Laws of Your Next Phase
…Ahh this must be why
Nature Made It Law
~Aby (they can shove the pound up their peephole bahaahahaa)
now here’s the NC poet http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/12/links-12913.html#comment-1701002
Good to read. Also, that guy is this guy, and he could use a buck or two. Penny a rhyme?
graphene-based-nanobots-can-suck-pollutants-from-our-oceans-2016-4
What happens when da big fish swallow ’em up?
and then when someone eats the big fish? but that would be thinking things through, a bane to “innovation”. I really wish scientists and entrepreneurs would stop trying to “fix” things and make things “better”. we now have “super gonorrhea”
prevention is not considered a moneymaker, but it could be. why is pragmatism only a valid course for letting things go until they threaten us with death and extinction?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo
They still need to come up with the nano-bot to eat waste plastic and then goes amok. So many ways for the Anthropocene to come to an end: Global warming mass extinction, Terminator Skynet cyber-state singularity, Grey-goo… all of the above? Thirty years ago that was all so fantasy cyber-punk, now it’s in the back of your mind. Not being flip, just noting that most of what we do gets out of hand – and we do so much now.
I’d settle for a nanobot that would suck up criminal TBTF banksters & corrupt politicians**……..
**a group of highly toxic manic-made pollutants……
What about a cyborg like Robocop?
Which has so many prescient themes for modern times it’s not funny.
It was tragic and shocking but during the Battle of Stalingrad, some Wehrmacht soldiers resorted to cannibalism.
Apparently, they found quartermasters very sustaining, when they couldn’t find any more horses.
Really, really sad.
Nanobots and prions probably have a lot more in common than the people hawking them want you to know about.
I beg to differ with Yves with what I am sure was said in half-jest.
Hillary Clinton is a Democrat through and through. Granted she and her party are far right of the Goldwater Republicans of her youth, but it is just plain self-misleading to pretend she, her donors, her voters, the entire party apparatus and super delegates are not definitive D’s at this point in time… and have been for decades.
If there were poster children of the party her husband, Obama or herself would be the only three candidates of the last what forty to fifty years? I mean they all did their level best to wipe Carter off the D servers. How long will it take for people to label the party what it is… entirely lawless, corrupt, entirely neolibralcon, entirely undemocratic. The place where “progs” go oh so willingly and knowingly to suspended inanimation.
A friend of mine had this to say:
Ever notice that for the Dem party mainstream, any and everything is a reason to “shift to the center,” that is, go right:
—Lose an election? Whoops, the party platform was too extreme, gotta go right.
—Win an election? Well, time for healing and unification, so let’s go right.
—No election? Have to be all bipartisan, must make compromises to govern, so gotta go right.
—Have a supermajority in both the House and Senate? We stand for all Americans, let’s go to the right.
—The entire Republican party has voluntarily submitted to either re-education or euthanasia? We must honor their sacrifice and move right.
I think a lot of her voters, and even some of her donors (but not the big donors), actually believe it when Republicans and editorial writers claim that she is a left wing liberal. The average person simply does not have the time or the interest to study her record in the Senate and the State Department. When she temporarily shifts her talking points to the left, they believe her. It’s very sad.
Maybe it’s more that a lot of her voters think they themselves are left wing liberals, without acknowledging the extent to which they actually support, or are at best willing to make excuses for, the Obama/Clinton versions of neocon foreign policy, predatory neoliberal economics, electoral and campaign finance shenanigans, policing/surveillance/suppression of dissent, etc.
Your hypothesis is disturbing, and quite possibly true. Millions of people actually supporting the things that Hillary Clinton has done — Yikes!
I’m already thoroughly creeped out by the support for Ted Cruz, theocrat. The only good thing about the New York Presidential primaries was that the Theocrat finished third, and not second or first.
I think you’re on to something here. However, I don’t necessarily think that these HRC supporters approve of the policies per se, but rather they are Authoritarians (in Bob Altemeyer’s sense) who agree with whatever the leader says. If you ask them, they will claim to be peace-loving, liberty-loving, supporters of the Welfare State. However, like any Authoritarian, they are blind to the ways in which their leadership acts against their professed values and are quick to make excuses and offer forgiveness for any apparent failings on the part of the leaders.
In short, they don’t support HRC because of her policy stances, but simply because she is the Democratic leader and they equate the Democratic party with all that is good and right. Their major value, however, is simply doing what the authority tells them, since in their mind what the authority says and what is right are, by definition, synonymous. That’s my take.
Yes, that’s pretty much the way it looks from where I sit in terms of my D-voter friends, although a few have awoken from their slumbers and realized who, exactly, Clinton is. They are currently Sanders supporters, but I expect that they’ll vote for Clinton in the general (it’s not foregone that she’ll get the nomination, but it’s becoming more likely, sadly).
My observation: most citizens are authoritarian. They love a Dear Leader and happily believe whatever fairy tales are fed to them about Dear Leader. I have heard the most craptastic stuff about the wonders of Obama that are so patently false that it takes my breath away. But trying to enlighten (kindly, gently) my Obamabot friends about Obama policies is no easier than attempting to enlighten Tea Partiers about their fairy tale beliefs. It’s all: la-la-la-la-laaa can’t hear you!
I think that is true to a certain point. If things get really bad then people will try to find an alternative. While Trump supporters might be in that category, he is exposing some hard truths that the Republican Party would rather keep hidden.
No one is confronting the weak Obama years from the D side in this election.
That makes it harder, but not impossible, to succeed in the future. I think we have reconcile our past before we can look ahead.
Those voters have be awakened.
(Maybe TPTB want us to take our anger out on Hillary, alone, so we overlook the system itself, and other actors/actresses).
Vatch and marym
Maybe folks just need a little help distinguishing left from right?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0aHhBApvSY
This is entirely the case, I feel. I had a discussion recently with a self-identified libertarian. When I stated that Clinton is neither “liberal” nor “progressive,” he was truly shocked and in disbelief of my statement. Other D-voter pals still view the Clintons are the poster children of “liberal.”
No most voters simply don’t get it. And that’s the way the 1% wants it, believe me. Inures to their benefit all around.
Obama is not that different from Hillary.
I totally disagree.
And frankly, what do Democrats do better than Republicans? Not a damn thing.
The Democrats held the Washington State House and Senate and Governorship during the time when they could have halted the bankers through stopping unlawful foreclosures. What did they do? Allowed 680,000 families kicked to the curb. Now, I hear that almost every countu government in Washington is suffering. Why? Lack of revenue. Where does that revenue come from? Housing. Excise tax and homeowner taxes.
They are beyond stupid. In attempting to save the poor widdle bankers, they’ve shot the counties in the foot.
It is my hope that this country goes up in flames quickly rather than the slow rot that is occurring. Go Trump! (I certainly won’t vote for the Queen)
680,000 foreclosures in WA alone? Wow… I know it’s bad, but the numbers are still shocking.
I’m considering having a Trump/Chuthulu 2016 bumper-sticker printed up, with the tag line “F*ck it, let’s just get this over with”
Haha…let me know, I’ll buy a box and stick them on random cars in parking lots.
cthulhu has traditional values. it sucks the life out of the people all at once, instead of over decades. thus, the lote.
Please, print them up and take my money!
I wonder if the tag line “F*ck it, lets just burn this mother down” would be more poetic and effective? If you decide it would be, feel free to use it. If not, then not.
This is the thinking at Intel about last year’s layoffs:
so, blame the PC division employees for PC sales drop? That’s how a meritocracy works? Krzanich realizes that if investors’ earnings go down, that’s how his merit is judged. So now more people have less income to buy things. And they just had another round of layoffs.
Can I simply say how incredibly depressed I am this morning? I can never wear my “I heart NY” t-shirt ever again.
I also am depressed that it is 4/20. I quit my I-502 job last week because I ended up so depressed every day seeing thousands of Washingtonians daily buying marijuana to make them “happy.” Couldn’t take it. We are now living Huxley’s “soma” days.
Take heart over 700,000 voters in NY agreed with you and I suspect that several hundreds of thousands more may have been disenfranchised by the process.
Yeah. It’s a tough day. But if you go over to that de Blasio is upset about vote-stealing piece, just check out the comments, for example:
“At 8:00 pm Eastern Time, CNN is reporting that the scrubbing of voters off of the rolls includes entire apartment buildings and even square blocks.”
People are awake in large numbers now.
To win, you ignore distractions like the de Blasio being upset news.
You prepare for 2018 and 2020 (and the rest of this year).
“It’s just business. So what TPP fails this time. Like NAFTA, we will just try and try again.”
And too, there is this:
Louie Louie Misheard https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I76ssjRjeqo
in my experience it doesn’t blind you to reality, as soma did.
Make it legal and we all can be ‘happy’ all the time, or as much as our income could afford it.
“Le them eat dope,” says the queen.
Make it all-the-WAY-legal, and many of us can grow our own, for free and with for money at all.
The 2016 NY primary popular vote is eerily similar to 2008. Clinton: 1,068,000 in ’08, 1,037,000 in ’16;
Obama: 751,000 in ’08, Sanders 752,000 in ’16. Clinton received 139 delegates in both elections. What did they do, use the same voting machines?
One difference, in ’08 the dem. primary took place over two months earlier. So in ’08 ,the NY primary provide no momentum against Obama.
Can Sanders come back? Suppose it depends if you count this as an unexpected loss. It seems pretty clear Clinton will not have enough pledged delegates to win the convention, so the super delegates will have to decide the race. That is one reason why the party wants Sanders to concede.
If I were a mainstream party operative, I would be worried that Hillary is unable to attract Independents needed to win a national race and also be concerned about her huge favorable to unfavorable ratings deficit. Trump/Cruz may be her best allies, but what if the Republicans actually do push through a more desirable candidate at the convention?
“Mainstream” in the Democratic Party largely means Clinton hack. The Democratic Party is in decline, and the Democratic elite are pretty open about their plan to cobble together a coalition which out of fear and not much else.
In 2014, they had one issue, defending abortion in a theoretical sense, and in 2016, they will discuss guns ad nauseam and hide behind dead children who never bothered them before but they need an issue now. Guns are a terrible Issue because the people who a are most about guns are usually gun nuts who outnumber the victims. Everyone else cares about issues they deal with every day.
If the GOP does push through a better spoken candidate, Hillary will be a historical disaster. She still might be one. Hillary hasn’t been hit on her foreign policy and her husband’s domestic policy outside of twitter. She might win, but she will be an unpopular President with a very hostile Congress. The Democrats aren’t retaking retaking the Senate with Hillary, so we can expect countless committees investigating the CGI.
Guns is a terrible issue because you will lose hope of gaining any votes from independents or repugs. Plus, it’s just stupid to talk about cutting back on guns in the US simply because there are so many guns already here. HRC was using that issue because that’s the only thing her advisors could think of to battle Bernie Sanders. Although she grossly distorted his record in order to do it.
Gun support goes without saying, but minds can be changed on education, transportation, the economy, and healthcare because people deal with these issues on a daily basis.
“We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it” is a brilliant line, partially because it moves LGBT, except for people who exclude the t, from the struggles of sodomites in a neighborhood to avoid to 1 out of every 10 people might be gay. It took time, but it’s almost an everyday issue.
The people most affected by Columbine and so forth voted for Sanders or tried to.
‘Hillary will be a historical disaster.’
Taking an hemispherical view:
Whether it’s an indictment or just an old-fashioned ‘dirt dump’, the R party will wait till after the July Democratic convention so they can cut her off at the knees.
All aboard the Clintitanic!
I’m not so sure. The Republicans still occasionally throw around “Benghazi” as a totem, but they pulled back fast when it became obvious Clinton was covering up CIA shenanigans and that it was the secrecy surrounding those dirty ops that largely caused the fiasco. They would need a scandal that didn’t include themselves or their buddies in the Intel community (remember the stories of Clintons conspiring with drug-running by the CIA through Arkansas to fund nastiness in Central America? the MSM and Congress have done everything imaginable to make that story disappear).Clinton is the candidate of the rotten system we have; that rotten system is not going to reveal itself in order to take her down.
You make good points, but that’s why, in part, I think the rightwing big wigs are so a-feared of Trump. Much as I dislike Trump, he is willing sometimes to tread where others won’t go, and he has already shot across the bow of the Bush Crime Syndicate. I could see Trump going after Clinton in a much more REAL way, whether it’s about the real truth of Benghazi or other similar stuff.
Vis Benghazi, I said from the beginning it’s a dirty CIA op that went south badly, and I feel little remorse for the US citizens killed. They were spooks and knew what they were getting into. It’s the way it goes.
The pols have mostly pulled back from Benghazi, but a lot of rightwingers still shriek about it. It would be, uh, interesting to witness the new Boss Trump of the conservaland revealing the real truth about Benghazi. Might make a few Tea Partier heads explode. Pass the popcorn!
Comrade Haygood as the Walter Sobchak of NC:
Trump might be the GOP’s best shot at winning the Presidency. Cruz? Ryan? Kasich? With a few exceptions–TPP and health care, they are just as reactionary as Trump. They may be better spoken to the extent that they stick to the script of the GOP platform, e.g., more effective evils, but when they start going public on things like private accounts for SS, eliminating abortion, vouchers for health care, they will shrink. This is not support for Clinton, but rather that there are worst choices than her that may not be successful in a national election.
I would attribute Kasich’s positive poll performance vs. Clinton to a lack of national media exposure unlike the other two possibilities that I mentioned. The more the microscope focus comes on him, the more he will decline. Publically, he comes off as the eyore suburban dad who browbeats his son for not being industrious enough.
It’s hard to remain optimistic after NY. Hopefully, future Sanders primary voters can still keep the enthusiasm going.
Polls have pretty consistently shown that if Clinton is the nominee, she wipes the floor with Trump, I think it will be far closer. Although I suspect a number of Sanders supporters will vote for her, many like me will not. Both have sky high negatives, but hers are baked in over the years.
It will be a sorry excuse for an election with these two. Though I will vote for Jill Stein to give the Greens greater ballot access and funding in the future, at least the Trump-Clinton debates should be entertaining.
And the wild card is still the FBI.
Polls about the general are based on models of turnout based on past elections. Non voters, “independents,” and enthusiasm are not accurately being taken into account.
It’s likely Hillary will win, but it will be closer than anyone thinks. BigDog and HillDog have been doing he same trick for years now. They are going to run hard to the right. She will crash and destroy the Democrats opportunity to take the Senate.
‘She will crash and destroy the Democrats opportunity to take the Senate.’
Just as she flipped the House to Republican control in 1994.
Those who can’t learn from history, etc.
And the Senate. And the majority of Governorships and state legislatures. It was an epic wipe out.
Agree. All this talk – from George Clooney, among others – about raising money for the down ticket is just that: talk.
Hilbot wants and needs Rs in control in the Congress and Senate.
I LEARNED from history, but clearly many were not paying attention.
raising money for the down-ticket races, aka money that has gone to Hillary’s campaign. I though it could not get any worse, but, Hillary Victory Fund
Not much faith in “wildcard” FBI. I think we will see a version of “sternly worded letter” directed towards Hillary’s aides that were involved but not a whole lot of focus on Clinton herself. Hope I am wrong.
Agreed. The last time a Clinton held the presidency, he was caught red-handed lying to a federal grand jury and witness tampering. We all saw how the Repubs were able to turn that slamdunk into a victory for Brand Clinton. So I have very little hope they would be any more competent with the blatant evidence against the current Clinton Foundation appointee.
I am however quite confident that HRC would use the Repubs bumbling as an excuse to move forward with the rightwing policies of her corporate paymasters.
I don’t know if it was a slam dunk. Team Blue never capitalized on it. The GOP had no business holding majorities then except “Democrats,” and W had one issue, “restoring honor.” It was fodder for smug liberals, but the GOP wasn’t held accountable at the ballot box until the Clintons were ousted from the party in 2005. It reminds me of Terry Schaevo. Gallups tracking indicates that overall the GOP reversed their losses from W’s privatization scheme and made Democrats who would definitely not vote Republican move to super definitely not voting Republican. The Democratic brand was at Kerry levels until Murtha came out against the war.
The Clintons are loved by partisan Democrats, but they would love anyone they saw as the rightful leader of Team Blue. The GOP helped their image with that group, but results don’t show that the impeachment hurt. The Republicans held seats they had no business in due to 1994, and they lost five House seats in 1998 with the impeachment looming.
Just to clarify: the “slam-dunk” (h/t George Tenet) was witness tampering and perjury by Bill Clinton. Team Blue capitalised on the whole issue by making Clinton’s lawbreaking into a Culture Wars issue instead. To this day many of my acquaintances support the Clinton brand on the sole basis of identifying themselves with the Clintons’ side of the culture wars instead of the GOP side.
If it had not been for that, what possible excuse would bluish individuals have for supporting the Clintons? They have no progressive achievements that are not identity politics related.
Party ID is very important, and the Clintons are the perceived rightful rulers of the party. I suspect many current Clinton supporters would have gladly supported Paul Kirk if he had run in 1992 and couldn’t care less about the culture wars. No Clinton partisan cared about guns until four months ago. They bemoaned LGBT activism for years and now simply peddle the fiction Hillary is a supporter of civil rights. Abortion is being attacked through zoning laws, and the Clinton partisans don’t care. If Hillary brought it up, they would repeat her talking points.
It’s the same as religion. They don’t know why they are a reverse Orthodox, conventarian, snake handler, but they do know the are a direct really like the minister who is very friendly in person. Shouting “but the Supreme Court” is the 21st century liberal’s “it’s in the bible.”
Leaks to Congress are the flip side of the problem. It wouldn’t be a problem to photograph every document and store them in a bank vault. The agent who brings down a corrupt President will be a hero and sign a huge book deal. Unlike Snowden who cast bipartisan doubts, the GOP will protect any leak to their side, and the GOP naturally despises the other. They won’t see Waxman’s investigation Into baseball players as a peace branch but as a sign of surrender.
Obama might put pressure on the FBI, but the GOP will have no problem putting an ex President in front of a congressional committee. Obama won’t look good if he put a serious concern about Hillary on the back burner, and Obama cares about his celebrity.
Looking more likely that HRC will finally get that secure Blackberry she’s always wanted from the NSA.
Guns, abortion, gay marriage, all issues that require no redistribution of wealth – while not socially BS issues, politically they sure are, which is why it’s all you hear out of the Democrats, and neo-liberals across the globe.
Trump! Who says a rebrand needs to be years in the making. We may finally be able to precisely, to the minute, quantify just how short the modern attention span is.
The Democratic Bob Dole? Hey, she’s owed it, there’s no stopping it.
The thing that kills me about Clinton is that she has on the wrong side of gay marriage, fracking, and minimum wage and so wishy washy on abortion that the social issue democrats should be rejecting her outright. I have no idea how any LGBT supporter can even remotely trust her, climate change same thing. I get that PP gave her weak tea pro-choice support cover, but how the hell did the rest of them miss that she doesn’t give a damn about them and their issues.
It truly does not matter to far too many Democrats that even on this stuff she can’t and won’t toe the party line except when campaigning in blue states.
I don’t think they do trust her. But we live in scary times, and in scary times people who feel threatened look to a caudillo to keep the bad guys away. The mainstream of the Republican Party makes no bones about wanting gays back in the closet and blacks and “uppity” women in their place. These people are legitimately scared for their well-being. Clinton is perceived as tough, strong, and connected–she may cover their backs. The alternatives are dreadful and openly hostile. Sanders is seen as old, weak, and not talking the language of power and protection that many crave. I think all these groups are dead wrong, that Clinton is going to be a disaster. But, like with Trump, we’re dealing with the politics of fear. The media and the political parties have been feeding the American amygdala for decades. This is the pathetic result.
I think this is true about non voters in the primary process who might have felt burned by Obama, but Hillary appears to be simply winning her same voters from eight years ago. Hillary had the support of older black women in the South in 2008.
From a passing glance, Sanders’ supporters are suspiciously similar to Obama supporters which could lead to them being seen as snake oil salesmen.
Then of course, I think more people have just quit than is commonly realized. With polls showing a close race and control of the Senate at stake, the once very popular in Virginia Mark Warner wound up with less votes tin 2014 than known racist George Allen had in 2006. I think there might be a problem when one goes outside the primary universe. Virginia’s voting population is much larger.
Call me idiotic (friends do!), but I still think Paul Ryan is the true Republican candidate and Trump ran just to make him look good. I still predict (see above) that he will be drafted and will accept the nomination in the end.
I believe that is the current plan. And it will either not happen or it will backfire. While his nomination will eat into the dissatisfied independent voters that might otherwise hold their nose and vote Clinton it will fracture his Republican support because the Trump followers will not play nice. Not only will they not vote for him, they will go after him. Beyond that I don’t see the Cruz conservatives falling in line with him either. I’m pretty sure tif it is not Trump it better be Cruz or his people will be screaming cheat as well.
Even with that, the best I think Clinton can do is a toss up with him. (And she’ll be blaming Bernie regardless of who she is running against if she doesn’t have an autobahn to victory.)
You are not idiotic, or else I am one, as well. I think that’s entirely possible, and all of Ryan’s protestations are just part of the Kabuki Show. Of course, time will tell…
Abso-f’ing-lutely, he’s a politician after all, and it’ll look like an almost sainted sacrifice when he descends from on high to save the country. But Trump’s ego isn’t Kabuki. Maybe with carrot or stick they will work out a smooth looking hand-off, The Donald and Ryan holding hands up high in the air on the convention stage with those creepy Republican smiles on their mugs. But if not the Trump voters already think the government is out to get them, imagine stealing their candidate right out from under them, while they watch? So, Bernie’s millions won’t vote for HRC, Trump’s millions won’t vote for Ryan… At least whoever becomes President can be sure that those few who voted for them really, really like them.
I would never vote for a Republican of any sort for any reason, so I won’t vote for Trump, or HRC.
Maybe he’ll be Trump’s veep and be to Trump what Cheney was to W.
Probably the only safe prediction we can make at this stage is that a Clinton vs. anyone-but-Trump general will result in the lowest turnout ever recorded.
damn, I thought I was the only one thinking like this…….thanks for validating my craziness !
He doth protest mucheth, don’t he?
Count me as one of those Indies who doesn’t find Hillary to be the least bit attractive. Not. Voting. For. Her.
Hillary vs Trump. Trump appears to be to her left on Israel-Palestine, Mid East wars, trade pacts. Overall Clinton will likely be better than Trump as prez but the bar is so low that it doesn’t matter much.
Interpolation has more validity than extrapolation. Don’t forget to bear this chart in mind:
https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/silver-superdelegates-1.png?w=575&h=465
money is NOT what mark zuckerberg is need of!
What is your name?” she murmured.
He cocked an eyebrow at her and then went back to staring at his brother. “I’m the evil one, in case you haven’t figured it out.”
“I wanted your name, not your calling.”
“Being a bastard’s more of a compulsion, really. And it’s Zsadist. I am Zsadist.”
J.R. Ward
Goldman posts weakest results in four years, revenue tumbles 40 percent
See, all that advice Hillary gave them during her paid speeches has paid off for them! If she can do for America what she’s done for Goldman….
don’t forget, he’s on CP time
BAHAHAHAA i jist snot’d: Utah declares porn public health hazard
Suppose atomic bombs had reduced the population of the world to one brother and one sister, should they let the human race die out? I do not know the answer, but I do not think it can be in the affirmative merely on the ground that incest is wicked.
bertrand russell
Utah can go to hell. They’ve also decided not to expand Medicaid, which would seem to be a much more clear and present public health hazard.
Maybe if Utah’s poor could lobby for Medicaid coverage for treatment and counseling of this public health hazard the state might be a little more flexible regarding expansion?
Ha – I like that, and it would be the most Utah thing ever. Utah decides to expand Medicare but only if the funds are used solely to treat porn addiction.
Remember, your eternal soul is more important than your temporary earthly body!
One of the things “Utah” tried was making it OK to discuss porn… 10 years ago Utah was so addicted to porn it was cross-eyed and all the brethren wandered around looking for understanding women to talk to… I kid you not. I know because they hit on me several times in a sneaky way – they’d start a conversation and then they’d slip in their confession that they had a problem, they were addicted to porn. And then they’d just sit there like hollow-eyed criminals and wait for me to tell them that it wasn’t really such a sin and pat them on the head. Creepy.
The problem with porn is that is is an addiction. Just like alcohol, tobacco, or heroin. I know because I am an addiction counselor.
What happens is eventually people decide to start acting on what they see, feel, and experience inside. It is a progressive, degenerative disease. Along the way, relationships are destroyed. So I would argue that yes it is a public health epidemic simply because of all the broken homes and associated societal costs.
Also, by declaring it a public thing, Utah is able to set aside funds do deal with those societal costs. So that maybe why they are declaring it as such — its the legal mechanism they have available to try and protect society.
next, video games/computer games. and rap.
fellow NCers all know that 70% of all anti-biotics are given to livestock, and that in many countries around the world, anti-biotics don’t need a prescription. for this article to link taking antibiotic resistant stds to an american taking an antibiotic for a lingering and likely bacterial upper or lower respiratory infection is dangerous. journalists love to spout the myth that ‘commoners’ go to the doctor for an antibiotic for a little cough but in this day and age nearly everyone knows better. most doctors these days will prescribe pain medicine before they’ll give an antibiotic to the detriment of those who really need them.
I went to the chemist last week to buy ibuprofen and there were 3 people in the queue ahead of me. 2 of those 3 told the chemist they had flu like symptoms, and were promptly handed amoxycillin, without any examination whatsoever (one was for a 12 year old no less!). In addition, I have acquaintances who think antibiotics are like aspirins, so they self-medicate with them to alleviate symptoms such as headaches or cough, with chemists gladly passing them out without so much as a physical exam, much less a prescription.
So it’s not just a problem in the US (which has more than its share of other pharmaceutical problems, eg opiods as M&Ms).
I don’t think you can even do this in the U.S.. Pharmacists can’t prescribe, you need a prescription from a doctor (or physicians assistant or something maybe, not sure about that). Opiates are different, they are often acquired on the black market through drug dealers, people aren’t generally going to the black market for antibiotics.
This is disturbing. Were they able to get the amoxycillin without a prescription from a doctor? Did they have ear infections in addition to the flu-like symptoms? Amoxycillin is often used to treat bacterial ear infections.
Totally disturbing, right? From what I witnessed, all they did was go up to the chemist desk without having seen a doctor first, and explain their flu symptoms verbally. One was a father asking for his 12-year old daughter, and from what I heard all she had was headache, cough and fever.
Here in Argentina drugs that are available OTC in the US, such as most cold medicines (pseudoephedrine, doxylamine, phenilephrine…) need a prescription, and my own doc thinks people in the US are nuts because they have free access to crazy strong medications OTC (not to mention the ease of getting stronger stuff). But for some dumb reason, anybody can waltz in and buy anti-biotics, and many people obviously do so, completely misunderstanding how they are used.
I wonder if I’m the only person who remembers that in the old days before they handed you an antibiotic when they cultured it to ensure it would respond to what they gave you?
We’ve got antibiotic resistant bacterias these day but instead of culturing the stuff they just keep switching the antibiotics. “Amoxicillin didn’t work- ok have a z pak.” No attempt to even figure out what they are treating anymore.”
They still culture it (at least my provider does, at least in the case of UTIs) but they don’t wait for the results to come back before starting antibiotics.
I also saw that information-free referrence to bronchitis as “viral”. I have had several bacTERial bronchitii
for which I required a course of antibiotics. I was finally authorisable for a pneumovax vaccination against the pneumoccus which is involved in bacterial bronchitis and also many pneumonias. I never did seek antibiotics for viral colds/ sore throats/ etc.
But the steady use of antibiotics against gonorrhea could certainly select for antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea and I suspect it did, just as the article says. So for that one disease, the article is correct. But it does seem to be written more generally as an invitation to ignore the contribution that mass-dosing of confinement livestock with antibiotics is making to superbugs all over the world.
I opened the NYT this morning to see the election results and the first item that showed up on screen was a Tweet by their Dem. Primary beat reporter, Nate Cohen:
OK, granted I’m no geographarian, but I just looked at the US states on the West Coast:
So on the West Coast at least, not only has Clinton no victories thus far, but she has yet not to be trounced by a margin of less than 40%.
On the East Coast, since the tweet is trying to combat the “HRC just wins in the South” argument, let’s look north of the Mason-Dixon line: Clinton won NY handily and barely squeaked by in Mass (under dubious circumstances), with the rest of the states yet to vote or clear Sanders victories.
So what the samhill is this tweet based on other than a desire to out Cohen as in the bag for HRC?
It’s all fine and dandy for people to tweet fact-bereaved stupidities, but how on Ganeesha’s green earth does the NYT hope to retain a shred of credibility posting said stupidities on the front page of its election coverage?
It’s the NEW YORK TIMES!
The “West Coast” to them is the Hudson River.
707!!!
Snort! Yes. Remember this famous New Yorker cover?
Cohen is a partisan hack. He wrote early on Trump had no chance. He drifts from his data crunching analysis to fact-devoid political analysis. According to Nate, Hillary wins States that reflect the race as a whole, not those caucus states. Every blog is about how Sanders can never win. He is part of the NYT’s propaganda machine in which pundits, beat writers and “analysts” work together feeding Hillary supporters lines to parrot in support of their candidate.
The Times backs Hillary and in the environment of journalist downsizing, why create animosity among high level editors? Whether you believe what you write is irrelevant to your career success. You write for the Times! The Times is only useful in this election for seeing how propaganda works and how her supporters think–or don’t think. You will never see a factually driven article analyzing policy with any degree of impartiality. It just doesn’t happen.
After all, Hillary is a seasoned, pragmatic, realistic leader who doesn’t promise free stuff to a bunch of idealistic, young, BernieBros who haven’t grown up and have no allegiance to the Party.
Watching MSM is like going to a benefit for the Clintons.
Need an anti dote..watch…
Empire Files: Abby Martin Exposes What Hillary Clinton Really Represents
Digging deep into Hillary’s connections to Wall Street, Abby Martin reveals how the Clinton’s multi-million-dollar political machine operates.
This episode chronicles the Clinton’s rise to power in the 90s on a right-wing agenda, the Clinton Foundation’s revolving door with Gulf state monarchies, corporations and the world’s biggest financial institutions, and the establishment of the hyper-aggressive “Hillary Doctrine” while Secretary of State. Learn the essential facts about the great danger she poses, and why she’s the US Empire’s choice for its next CEO
https://youtu.be/PV_PLCC6jeI
So let’s all vote “green” to show them clintons that we’re mad as hell and we’re not gonna take it anymore.
Oh, and to preserve “ballot access,” just in case we become relevant someday.
Because Donald Trump is such a bad man.
What actions has Donald Trump taken in his life as a business man and media whore to convince me that he is not a bad man?
You can keep on shrieking that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but it don’t make it so.
Watch the video.
Whatever Trump has done, he hasn’t done anything as reprehensible as that.
And, didn’t you get the memo? “Whore” and “shrieking” are sexist and misogynistic references. That type of language will not be tolerated in the political discourse of this campaign.
Especially when such a reference is accurate.
I will NOT be voting for Donald Trump. He’s a misogynist dirtbag who has no problem discriminating against broad swathes of people. So he’s a pass for me.
Jill Stein is closer to my ideology and I’m voting based on my belief system, not based on whether or not people consider me or that belief system “relevant.”
If your aim is to change the discussion, you need more than a party with a newsletters in which the right things are written, though. No matter how well-meaning and how ‘right’, elites, if only because of their small numbers, cannot change things. They need to (care about) educate/ing & empower/ing a base, and make/ing people aware that they can do things, together. So if you want to vote Green, by all means, but please, also consider those aspects.
Every Hillary supporter should be forced to watch this video. It covers a lot of ground in a short amount of time. There is so much wrong with Hillary and Bill that they get away with People forgetting so much. Just seeing the reminder of Hillary’s relationship with Kissenger should make every Democrats skin crawl. But no–they will rationalize it all away.
Hillary’s foreign policy is scarier than Bush’s and that is saying something. She is more like Cheney.
A lot of people could use free stuff.
To win, you have to broaden your appeal.
Remember, the NYT endorsed Hillary on Jan 31st.
Word went out to its stenographers: this is total war.
So the newsroom scene resembles that iconic painting of Washington crossing the Delaware: Krugthulhu stands tall in the boat, while Cohen heaves miserably at the oars with frozen, blistered fingers.
More amusing last night was their editorial listed on their live primary coverage page urging Kasich and Sanders to stay in the race because it was up to the voters to tell them when to go. Considering that Sanders is at least within reach of Clinton even if it is a considerably longer shot this morning and Kasich has no shot whatsoever at the nomination, imagine how great my cynicism about their intentions when I know this was really about Kasich and Sanders was only included because not doing so wouldn’t just be obvious. It would have been a flashing HD Video billboard that it isn’t about what voters want at all, but just about slowing Trump down as much as possible.
at least trump crushed cruz. he may be the lesser of two awfuls, if clinton gets the nomination, as seems likely now. i’m voting stein in any case, if i can’t write in bernie. and trying to keep in mind, it’s the long haul that’s important.
The long haul just got considerably shorter.
likely so, with climate change and war on the horizon.
As “Vatch” has noted, 5% gets the green party federal funding. Party building has to start somewhere. Hillary’s first task will be to close Democratic primaries in 2020 to prevent a challenge. Her voters will be four years older and have to deal with the reality of the real Hillary which is the Hillary we’ve seen for the last 25 years. Re-releasing the government’s ufo files won’t change perceptions.
Of course, the gop might go ahead and impeach her and the vp once her numbers tank installing Paul Ryan.
“……voting stein….”
bill, hillary, and wall street thank you. The rest of the country, not so much.
so you advocate trump? that won’t help much, but it may be the lesser of 2 awfuls. why on earth the clintons and wall street would prefer trump over clinton is not clear to me. wall street may well be ok with trump, but the clintons won’t.
I do, especially if the “democrat” machine is prepared to crush the only true democrat in the race, Bernie Sanders, and permanently become the party of the neoliberal oligarchy.
I agree with his trade policies including possible tariffs to force manufacturing back into the us. Unlike clinton 2.0, there will be no TPP under a President Trump, and the other trade agreements will be “renegotiated.”
obamacare will be repealed. (Although it appears that may be unnecessary since it seems to be self-destructing all on its own.)
I agree with his policy of limiting foreign military involvement, especially in the middle east, and his less than full-throated support of israel.
I agree with his support of veterans, and his commitment to rebuilding this country’s infrastructure.
And he may even let his “justice department” and FBI prosecute hillary as she should be prosecuted.
Why in the world do you think so many of TPTB are aligned against him?
The clinton Trojan horse of the “party of the people” must be stopped at all costs, and I’m prepared to put my money where my mouth is.
Well, that’s two votes for the Trumpster – and I’ve never voted for a Republican for president in my life.
I’m in……
Me, too.
And I’ve been in for months. If not Bernie, then Trump. No HRC. Not now, not ever.
Ditto. I loathe the GOP after being a member for 20 yrs but I do recognize that Il Douche is effectively Independent
If not Bernie, then Trump. No hrc. Not now, not ever.
Amen.
Trump is for getting out of NATO unless they pay.
He is not for getting into a shooting war with the Russians without a better reason.
He might replace Janet Yellen.
And for getting better trade deals, and he wants to keep jobs (if not people) in America.
On the other hand, he says he has a Jewish son in law. Whatever that means.
He also said he would not rule out use nuclear bombs on Western Europe. No candidate has said we should get rid of them completely. So, that means we reserve the right to use them on someone (assuming some people are more exceptional and we should rule them out)…brown people, black people, Slavic people maybe.
He’s bombastic and insensitive.
Then, there are times he looked like he was under control. Maybe he will apologize for some of the things he said. No one knows.
Do we know him at all?
Can we trust him with the global reserve currency at his disposal?
i think they are aligned against him simply because he isn’t part of their machine. i don’t believe him about his policies, but at least it’s still an open question–with clinton i know exactly what to expect. i think the most important things are to get moving on climate change, get the banks and multinationals under control and prosecute some financial criminals, and get the national security state under control. toward those ends, i’m torn between supporting trump with a vote, because i want the system to be destablized, to whatever extent it would be under a trump presidency, or trying to build a green party or a new independent party by voting stein or bernie.
my state will vote for trump anyway, assuming the republicans don’t successfully ratfuck him, so my individual vote doesn’t matter–i’m just talking about what the best tactics are in the short term. and as a poster above said, the long term just got shorter.
I believe that the best way to help the Green party, or any other non-legacy party, is to first destroy the Dem party. That means voting for the Repug candidate instead of $hillary.
If one assumes Trump can win and one is trying to rationally figure out what a Trump presidency will be like look at who he will appoint. All else is based on taking his word at face value which seems the height of foolishness (it’s really like people never learned *anything* from Obama).
With Bernie we have a record in the Senate etc. at least, but with Trump we have positions backed by absolutely nothing. Suckers born every minute indeed.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Trump took an establishment Republican turn although that’s less guaranteed than that Hillary will govern mostly as a typical Republican. Already his foreign policy picks are moving in that direction.
One can say a few things about Trump knowing little about how he would actually govern such as his rhetoric alone will set race relationships backward, but that’s about the limits one can know from rhetoric.
Trump has come out saying he doesn’t believe in human caused climate change, so he’s not anyone’s hope there.
Agreed. After yesterday, I am voting for Trump. The Democratic Party in my state is corrupt beyond belief.
Can’t say I plan to vote for him (or anyone) but Trump is surely no less ridiculous a candidate than Reagan or Dubya. It’s quite possible that the MSM may come to love Trump just as much as they were “on bended knee” to those two. The press are a suckup to power. They are also desperate to remain popular and will only go so far to defy popular success.
This is why glib predictions of Hillary crushing Trump are off base. As a non politician with no governing record Trump can reinvent himself any time he wants. After all the main line of attack for his opponents in the primary has often been that he is a RINO. Trump could very well run to the left of Hillary.
Trump’s statement of several months ago that American “wages are too high” seems to have been purged from memory.
Frankly, I’m not sure there would be much difference between a Hillary and a Trump admin. Trump would moderate his policies to incorporate mainstream republicanism, with the occasional lapse into vintage Trumpism–“oh that Trump, just being himself”–while Hillary will drop her faux populism and return to the same oligarchy mindset.
With a spat here and there, Congress will work with both of them and the status-quo will remain unchanged.
Ditto his “global warming is a hoax invented by the Chinese to destroy our industry”, but don’t get in the way of people burning with obsessive hate–no reasoned arguments need apply and things that people around here destroyed Obama for doing nothing about (like raising wages or dealing with climate change) they will give Trump a pass on because they just hate Clinton that much. To avoid the obviousness of their ‘lesser of two evils” choice, they’ll give us full-on Obamabot-style bullshit hopey-changy nonsense based on a very parsed reading of a few vague comments (which he often contradicts ten minutes later) from Trump.
One advantage of Trump as far as the Senate is concerned would be a slight increase in gridlock. GB couldn’t get his way with SS not because Democrats don’t salivate the same as their brethren from across the isle, but rather because it was unseemly for Dems to bow to Rethug Pres. A slightly more temperate form of obstructionism than the honorable elephants with chain saws that saved the day for a lot of elderly.
Good rationale, but it isn’t Trump that I would be worried about so much as his running mate and advisors. I fear a situation on par with Bush/Cheney in which Trump is only a figurehead for far worse. Trump is pretty well acknowledged to be a no-nothing blowhard, he will need someone to take up the slack and judging from the sources he quotes I am not sanguine about who he would choose. I strongly suspect that it would be whomsoever makes the best toady, and extreme conservatives have some pretty awesome toadying skills.
I think there may be more to worry about in a Trump Administration than is commonly acknowledged, so a Green protest vote may well be the best option.
An advantage of Hillary would be to show her Democratic supporters exactly what they had bought with thier money; recession, war, depression to name some of the milder outcomes, then the complete blackout on any climate change legislation other than window dressing that might threaten the fracking or oil industry for the next eight years is uniquely well timed to get us past the tipping point and into the realm of non avoidable destruction and mayhem on a scale never before reached by any president or human.
On the other hand, as has been mentioned, the Obamabots seem eager and willing to swallow anything, gas chambers for showers wouldn’t surprise me, so perhaps I should be careful what I wish for.
I think those people considering voting for Donald Trump out of pure spite for Hillary need to step back from the situation, take a deep breath and consider the bigger picture. It’s easy to imagine that a Trump presidency will not be so bad, after all, he goes off script and says things he’s not supposed to say, and that’s refreshing. Some of the policies he claims he will follow aren’t that bad either. He’s an ‘anti-establishment’ candidate, or at least, if he’s a different kind of crook than the establishment crooks we’re all so sick of.
So it’s easy to say if we can’t have Bernie, then we’ll vote for Trump just to make sure Hillary loses, and then justify it with these reasons. I get it, I despise the Clintons as well. But I think that a Trump presidency might look ok on paper, until the reality of it sinks in and you find yourself at the business end of a pitchfork. Because mob mentality, bigotry, hatred, racism, these are things that Trump has already brought to the front of the national mood. He’s already served to legitimize these attitudes, and I can’t just dismiss that dynamic.
We should not, we can not let Trump speak for us as a nation, at least not without raising hell about it. He represents some of the worst qualities of humanity, and let’s not lose sight of that.
oh he is awful. i’m wouldn’t be voting for him purely out of spite, although i admit i have a lot of spite toward the clintons and obama; it would be because he may destablize the system to some extent (how much is very much an open question), and right now whatever discomfits the vampire squids and interferes with them is a goal worth pursuing imo.
I worry Trump’s Wall is meant to keep Americans in, not Mexicans out.
I’m in CA so it won’t matter. I still don’t think the Rs will let Trump have it. The biggest kick in the teeth would be Trump or do I try to get the green party some movement. I’ll wait to see.
I would have preferred that an organization/party formed from what has/is occurring but Sanders has done nothing on that front and unfortunately, none of his supporters have stepped into the space. I wonder who Sanders will sell his data to.
As “Vatch” has noted, 5% gets the green party federal funding
Jill Stein has about as much chance of getting 5% of the vote as KIm Kardashian has of winning a Nobel Prize. Probably less if it’s in Economics
don’t know unless we vote for her. sanders had even less chance to do as well as he has, a year ago.
So to be clear you are postulating that in the event killary gets the nod sanders voters will choose clinton over stein as a monolithic whole? To your second point K.K. is probably as qualified as anyone to win the nobel in econ, as the Kard family economy seems to be pretty extensive. do you have a nominee in mind who would be markedly superior to K.K.? Further, is there some reason why people should not vote green, or is it your opinion that they simply will not vote green? For me, I will be tempted to vote to blow up the dem party, but vatch’s points have indeed swayed me in the direction of stein, at least it’s making a positive out of a negative
A substantial fraction of the Bernie supporters will never vote for Hillary. Assuming she’s the Democratic nominee, I think it is possible that the Green candidate could get 5% of the vote. She (or he) won’t win any states, but sometimes it’s necessary to take a long view and do some party building, as NotTimothyGeithner and PretzelAttack have pointed out.
If we look at this as beyond just one personality, we realize the frustration, the anger is there, that anyone could have tapped that energy.
Any smart politician would want to take advantage of that.
Will we see more candidates like Sanders, at all levels?
Don’t some realize how which way the wind was blowing has changed?
The question I like to see answered is this:
Can a student have enough to donate to the presidential candidate, the gubernatorial candidate, the senatorial, congressional, municipal candidates etc?
Or do we go public financing?
Is small donor financing doable on every level, at the same time?
Yes, take some short term pain to build for the long term.
If winning is not everything in politics (except in Realpolitik), then it’s time to be honest about Obama and the last 8 ‘weak’ years.
That will steer us in the right direction for the near future.
Oh bite me already.
A vote for Stein is a vote for Stein.
I’m past sick of people telling me I HAVE to vote for the lesser evil in order to fend off the greater evil. I don’t.
If you want to go that route more power to you. However, quit blaming everyone else for the fact that your candidate has odious views that don’t attract voters as anything other than an alternative to the corrupt views of the other guy. If your candidate doesn’t merit support that’s HIS fault, not the electorates.
Writing in Bernie is a complete waste. At least a vote for a third party vote creates the potential to preserve and expand ballot access for additional parties, and I think this is worth doing. We’re going to need them.
What about Sanders quitting the D party and joining a third party like the Green Party?
Good question. I am beyond disgusted with the Dems.
I know he’s a classy guy, but surely after they ratfucked him, over and over again, he doesn’t owe the Ds his loyalty.
He’s consistent in issues and his D loyalty. There is no way he’s giving up his committees. This whole primary has been deflecting the corruption of the D party and Clinton in particular as innocent victims of a corrupt finance system.
Obama had an org and cut it off as soon as he was elected. Sanders doesn’t even have an org that could try and continue.
Stein tweeted yesterday that’s she’d like to work with Sanders to keep the revolution going.
I would hope that Sanders wouldn’t rule out a dual pronged approach to dealing with the status quo and corruption.
There’s room within the system for working to reform the Democratic Party AND working to create more viable alternatives to them. The best thing that can be done is to give the electorate choice so that they don’t have to choose corrupt when that’s what the DNC insists must be put up.
i would love to see stein and sanders working together.
He can then keep repeating the same well-received (actually enthusiastically) message of wealth inequality in America today.
Sometimes you have to keep saying it for a while.
Also, the D party doesn’t make people. People make the D party. He takes the party spirit from the FDR days, and those who still believe in it, to a new party, that new party is the D party. I think you can say good-bye to the existing D party.
+1 to this entire thread, but I haven’t given up on the D primary quite yet. It’s unlikely, but no more so than him getting this close in the first place.
I would love to see Sanders run for and get the nomination of the Greens–afaik, the Greens’ nominating convention is this summer. I suspect the party would get well over 5 percent and actually become something politically useful.
Maybe the best legacy Sanders could leave.
All sheer speculation and fantasy on my part.
While listening to the car radio yesterday evening before NY polls closed, NPR’s Mara Liasson said Bernie’s recent string of wins against Hillary were in Republican states the Dems had no change of winning in the general, so they were not important.
I was expecting her next to say Hillary would be better in the general because she’s Jewish and Bernie’s not.
Oh well.
I try to tune out when Fox staffer Mara Liasson comes onto National Propaganda Radio. No thanks. Not interested in listening to what Roger Ailes has dictated today.
You toss human beings toward the West
and make Lesbos quite the mess,
With police state, crush dissenters
while giving smugglers soft caresses,
Your southern border is open for Daesh,
but working reporters are harassed,
You bomb the Kurds while letting ISIS skate
and wrap it up in nationalistic hate,
At Bestepe you build a pharaonic temple,
New Turkey or North Korea? – the mind does wrestle,
When your Saudi funders fall,
will it be your time against the wall?
Or in St. Moritz will you land,
with rent wired in from Cayman Grand?
+++
Nice.
Nature’s justice is more like a cough. Time between incident and response can be confusing.
Yes, so true and good to remember.
Despite the NY loss, there have been some real eye openers from the Dem primary –
* Both Paul Krugman and Nate Silver have been exposed as the partisan hacks they are.
* Corporate media, even so called Liberal MSNBC has bent out of shape to serve their masters.
* Majority of old parents seem to vote against their children’s interest.
Speaking of msnbc, had on parts of the day yesterday and catching comments from time to time, and damn if they not have a clinton surrogate on whining about bernie being so negative, seemed like constantly, finally turned it off, if not paying attention one would think she being trounced, so much for msnbc
Another benefit is the exposure of the details of corrupt primary systems, exp in NY. NY is closed, so controlled end-to-end by the Dem Party, and what do we know about those guys? Here Is Catherine Austin Fitz on Andrew Cuomo. NY politics are not just a racket, but *total racket*.
B/c of the scrutiny this primary, we have seen corruption in nearly every possible way, from media blackouts, bias, what would be considered in other circumstances money laundering, fairly apparent voter suppression. The only thing we have not seen so far (OK, perhaps I am too optimistic here…) is actual voting machine vote-stealing.
There is a huge gravy train, we are not on it, but the people who are will kill us before they let us stop it.
Lots of lessons learned.
The next step is to apply them, to the remaining primaries, and in 2020.
Speaking of primaries, why hasn’t Bernie endorsed and fund raised for Tim Canova yet?
“Trump says that while he likes Janet Yellen’s low interest rates, he is not a big fan of Janet Yellen herself. “I think she’s done a serviceable job,” Trump tells Fortune. “I don’t want to comment on reappointment, but I would be more inclined to put other people in.””
Be silent. Keep your forked tongue behind your teeth. I did not pass through fire and death to bandy crooked words with a witless worm.
~Gandalf
What is Trump’s problem with J-Yel?
With her emerging ‘one and done’ rate hike stance, she’s kept the bubble going long enough to maintain a happy glow through the election.
J-Yel’s a politician’s dream — out of sight, out of mind … and easy like Al.
Keeping the bubble helps Hillary.
And that’s subtractive to Trump.
fer sure Caarl Icahn is his fin min
Re CryptoNet.
eek.
My girlfriend and I live in Williamsburg Brooklyn. We are both registered Democrats. We were contacted by the Democratic party within in last ten days. We have had Sanders campaign people come to our door recently. Obviously we were on the list of registered voters a week or so ago. We did not vote in 2012.
I was not able to vote yesterday because I was not in town. My girlfriend arrived at the correct polling station to cast her vote for Bernie. She was not on the printed listed of voters. After arguing with the poll workers she was given a provisional ballot which she says was thrown into a kind of laundry basket.
This is a disgrace. I am not aware of any similar problems with Republican voters. This was election fraud by the NY Democratic party.
yes it was. if HRC cannot win honestly, $he’ll lie, cheat and steal to win with the support and complicity of the DNC and NY Democratic party. They are shameless.
Lets add a few up. If you vote using a machine, your vote is changed or ignored. If you vote inside a system controlled by R and D’s, your vote is counted only if it is for their candidate.
The outcome is determined by the party that tells the machine what to print out after it is all done. Haven’t you seen enough stories about how to hack a voting machine to know they have never fixed these issues because they are the primary feature of the machine.
Worry about AI later, even the simplest machine will be used against you if you allow it.
Why hand-marked paper ballots counted in public are the way to go, with Election Day as a national holiday.
This is one reason I don’t take the NY primary seriously. The state is just as corrupt as it was when I went to university there 50 years ago. It amazes me how many people on NC are saying that it’s over for Bernie because of NY–a state that only turned out 32% of its registered voters! Not to mention the incredible waste of money on separate primaries for presidential and congressional. Sorry New Yorkers, but the fact that you continue to allow closed primaries, too many primaries, no early voting, and a completely incompetent BOE puts the state behind most banana republics in terms of election results reflecting the will of the people.
Why have a primary at all?
When, for example, the Democrats in New York hold a primary, you only have Democratic candidates on its ballot.
Can an Independent be on it? Can a Green Party candidate be on it?
People commented that since it was government’s money, all votes should be able to vote. By the reasoning, then, all candidates should be on one ballot.
Why not just put every candidate’s name on one ballot in November?
Either
A) no parties at all (just one general election, no primaries, and we put every candidate’s name on one single ballot in November – parties don’t get to nominate their ‘knights’ for the upcoming battle),
or B) I think primaries should not be government funded, and they should be closed, so political parties can do their private business of nominating their candidates, who will represent their parties in Nov.
The critical factor you may or may not understand is that the NY State Constitution puts all the control in the hands of three people: Governor and speakers of the Senate and Assembly. No one else counts. And it is the legislature that must amend the state constitution. New Yorkers know that those three men are never going to give up all that power, and they have no means to force them to change unless you get a reformist victory in the State House and both branches of the legislature, and they have been gerrymandered so that the Republicans control the senate and the Dems to Assembly in perpetuity. It would take a federal effort under the voting rights act to force any change, and I don’t see that happening.
Thanks for your personal story. Yes, the NYS D-primary system is corrupt. The Clintons will do whatever it takes to make sure Hillary wins. You and your girlfriend are collateral damage. Take notes and don’t forget.
“Take notes and don’t forget”
I wonder how much it would take to set up a parallel system…. Which is what I wonder about a lot of stuff…
Do honeybees feel?
Scientists to objectively, not emotionally (without feelings, of course), rationally, logically, find out.
Remember honeybees work and do take time off. Now, do scientists feel? How do we find out? Catch them at work?
So, it’s possible
1. Honeybees feel
2. Scientists don’t feel
well…I FEEL for my honeybees……does that count?
when I recently hived a bee package…….i found a number of bees wallowing in the syrup can that came with the box…….they would have drowned had I not allowed them, a few at a time, to crawl onto my finger, to be gently placed on the hive entrance landing……..
I would like to think they FELT an appreciation for my assistance!
I sure felt good helping them!
That’s nice. I know of some people who take time to enjoy the world like that.
And hopefully, like that penguin who makes annual visits to his savior in Brazil, the bees come back and do a dance for you every year.
Where is Democracy Spring?
I don’t know. Maybe add some value by dropping a link?
Nanobots to suck pollutants from the ocean.
What about vampire-bots to suck greed out of bankers?
Senior Clinton Aide Tells Reporter: Fuck Bernie
http://gawker.com/senior-clinton-aide-tells-reporter-fuck-bernie-1772003114
“We kicked his ass tonight,” a senior Clinton aide told me Tuesday night. “I hope this convinces Bernie to tone it down. If not, fuck him.”
I don’t typically like promoting Gawker but this article has some decent supplementary material, whereas Politco’s drivel makes their article unbearable.
i hope it convinces bernie to amp it up. i’m not sure he can change his personal style to do that, though.
Aides talk like that privately all the time.
You won’t find Hillary caught using that word…not publicly, and it would be a major victory for Sanders if she did that.
Not sure if this should convince Bernie to amp up anymore than what needs to be done to save the country.
I hope Bernie makes her lie, cheat and steal her way through all the states and I hope it becomes all to clear at the end to the DNC that they better pull out their fainting couch because there will be a floor fight.
sorry, i meant the cheating going on in new york, coupled with the fuck bernie attitude that is so prevalent in the clinton campaign, starting with the clintons themselves.
And many of us have reciprocated with the same carnal attitude towards the Clintons.
Will Bernie be our champion, for those of us feeling like getting intimate with Bill and Hillary, in that respect as well?
are we depriving them of adequate healthcare? are we paying lip service to climate change while not doing nearly enough in office? starting wars?
whatever our personal attitudes toward the clintons and the rest of the oligarchy, their iron grip on power in this country needs to be broken.
Then you can bet it was allowed to go public for a reason.
turning right, throwing progressives under the bus, establishing their red blooded american hatred of socialists.
Bernie should have amped it up last year. He was way too nice to the Clinton Colossus for far too long.
It’s hard to know, even in retrospect. On the one hand, not going after Clinton hard means foreclosing speaking a lot of hard truths). On the other, if he starts out attacking Clinton, he might not even get a hearing (her favorables were still high in 2015 IIRC.
And now, the Clintonites have now managed to drag the entire campaign into the mire of identity politics-driven incrementalism (meaning the “4 C’s” of clientelism, credentialism, corruption, and classism).
The entire Democratic apparatus reminds me of one of those fatbergs that periodically appear in sewage systems:
Apparently, there’s no way to simply blow a fatberg up or dissolve it. They must be removed with painstaking human labor. And so with politics….
Tone it down? Gee, I hope it convinces him to run third party instead.
The ONLY way progressives-liberal-pinkos will ever make an impression on the Democratic Party-let alone start to reform it- is when they clearly prevent it from winning and running off with all the spoils. If libprogs can make Democrats lose by splitting the vote, big money will eventually stop flowing in the direction of the Democrats (and attracting/rewarding the wrong sort of people) and then maybe that party can become the party of the common folk again. If Bernie Sanders were truly committed to winning for his peeps, he would be 100% committed to making Mrs. NAFTA lose -lose the nomination, the general election and hopefully her freedom to walk about outside the walls of federal prison as well. I’ve haven’t seen that level of commitment from him. So while I give him support I have had a hard time all the while taking his candidacy as fundamentally serious. Presidential politics is a blood sport, and monsters like the Clintons love it for that, so it’s best to stay off the field unless you have a real thirst.
Fuck the Clintons and their jackbooted corporatist minions.
Ehhh that was what some thought after Nader in 2000 and it didn’t happen.
Lest we forget, 8 years of Bush and Cheney convinced all but the most committed to consider any Dem in 2008. If Sanders is pushed out, and it looks as if he will be, then we are in for calamitously bad governance for at least 4 years. The saddest thing is that it will be the insane refusal of elites to deal with climate change that will hurt us all the most.
It can’t be a one-off event like Nader 2000. It would naturally take time for the Democrats to lose their corporate donation stream. It was a landmark of Bill Clinton’s presidency that the Democrats under his leadership finally achieved parity with Republicans in corporate fundraising. To disrupt this sordid status quo would require a prolonged spell of Democrats losing, getting locked out of office because people who are sick of being screwed by them refuse to vote for them anymore. Otherwise, if the Democrats can take all non-Republican votes for granted, they only have to wait their turn and everyone knows it. Hence the money keeps coming, because soon enough it will be an investment that will pay dividend to the donor. The money has to stop. People including some of the most corrupt, like DWS keep talking about Oh dear, the evil of money corrupting politics! . It will only stop for the Democrats if they can’t get elected. Until the money stops they won’t change. Why would they? And I don’t mean we need to change their minds. You won’t do that. This change can come only as a steady torrent of political obituaries. Keeping Dems in their current incarnation from getting elected should be progressives’ job if we want an actual alternative to the Republicans to emerge someday. Either we burn the party down until the scumbags currently infesting it leave for richer opportunities elsewhere boosting cars and selling drugs to third graders, or else in the process we create a viable new party that rises over the grave of the Democrats.
You have a point about running 3rd party, in the general election.
You have to keep repeating the message.
And if not 2016, then 2018 and 2020 (and on and on)…
if science advances one funeral at a time the same is true of progress in society.
Yes. Let’s hope is not too late for the young.
Nader was in 2000. This is 2016. Sanders was able to attract an electorate an order of magnitude larger than Nader.
One would think that would be a cause for some introspection by the Democratic party apparatus, but one would be wrong.
Thanks for the link to Patrick Cockburn excerpt. He is truly a treasure, and no one should write a paragraph on Syraqistan without reading him first.
One paragraph that stuck out to me was:
Which should of course draw an immediate comparison to the Korean War, where the KPA made a long-planned strategic retreat starting with Inchon. US forces retook Seoul and then crossed the 38th parallel to minimal opposition. While MacArthur was doing his victory dance on the banks of the Yalu, the KPA reassembled, now with Chinese allies, and pushed back the invasion.
Someone wiser than I once said something about those who don’t learn from history…
It reminds you of Korea. It reminds me of Vietnam. It’s not new; we’ve been here before. I’m not arguing with Yves Smith’s evaluation of “important”, but the parallels with the past are important too – maybe more important than Cockburn’s actual article.
@Ian at 8:14
I doubt that Senator Sanders will win a proportion of delegates greater than his percentage of popular vote. I live in Orange County, NY and the ballot required two sets of decisions: First, Former First Lady, Hillary Clinton, or Senator Bernie Sanders, then second, elect six delegates to attend the Democratic National Convention. There were six delegates listed on Clinton’s line, Sanders had four. So even if Sanders won Orange County, which sadly he did not (Teachout fared far better against Cuomo) Clinton would pick up delegates in excess of her popular vote percentage.
Wired like a breadboard in an electronics science fair.
Welcome to Clintonville.
We control the horizontal and the vertical …
The Outer Limits of corruption ? Or are we not there yet ?
Would be interesting to read more about this. Were Sanders people not organised enough with registration dates, or did the DNC start to learn some lessons from the Colorado, Nevada conventions?
New York State primary results map by county. Clinton won 8/62 (NYC and environs, Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester).
http://www.cnn.com/election/primaries/states/ny/
Almost identical to the map of Massachusetts, where I live. exactly the same kinds of areas went for Clinton and Sanders. It’s funny that urban people, usually associated with flux and change, are now the agents of a rigid, defensive, status quo, while the “static” rural areas now hunger for change.
It concerns me a lot more that Clinton won lower income and higher income brackets, with Sanders taking the middle.
If poor and working class people think “the oligarchs will take care of us” instead of “let’s create a situation where we can take care of ourselves” that’s concerning. And it’s also the message that Clintonian incrementalism conveys. FMH as the hackers say in situations of lossage.
The poor listen to their church leaders/local society leaders, who often give them instructions and leverage to extract the best possible out come from difficult to extract benefits, like public housing, stamps, etc. Modeling what goes on in black communities, my guess is they mistake this as care for them and their situation instead of a watered down and cheapen form of Tammany Hall patronage, which naturally requires them to ignore the “honest” graft of their leaders. They vote for whom their leaders tell them to vote, and in those long established organs, their leaders are well and deeply embedded in the Democratic machine.
Got an email from work today saying “With that said, I hope you will join me in enrolling and participating in the new Pulse at Dartmouth program that will allow us to engage with our health online, on campus at Health Stations, and via mobile apps, while earning rewards along the way. The Pulse program is provided through a partnership between our Wellness at Dartmouth office and a well-being organization affiliated with Richard Branson’s Virgin Group. Through the Pulse program our employees will have access to a comprehensive suite of personalized tools and support including fun challenges similar to the MOVE IT challenge, activity, sleep and nutrition trackers, social connections, a personal health assessment, and more.” He says the goal is to decrease Dartmouth’s health care expenditures. Funny enough, I can’t afford to use my crapified insurance as it is. 1984 is here.
I don’t believe there’s any empirical support for the effect of Wellness programs* on health outcomes,
even thoughwhich is why ObamaCare provides funding for it.* More walking around money for people with credentials in that fields.
RE: US taxpayers growing tired of Ireland’s one big idea-
I haven’t seen anything about this story here but the DOT announced this past Friday it would grant Norwegian Air Shuttle permission to operate transatlantic flights to the United States.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/flights/todayinthesky/2016/04/15/dot-tentatively-approves-norwegian-air/83080974/
The problem is the long haul version of Norwegian Air Shuttle is an alter-ego company with the exact same name and management as the real Norwegian Air Shuttle based in Norway. In order to avoid paying Norwegian taxes, Norwegian wages and dealing with Norwegian regulations the company’s CEO registered it’s new 787’s in Ireland and is staffing the operation with a rag-tag motley crew of desperate international pilots and flight attendants from countries with bad economies. Norwegian employees back in Norway are completely segregated and cannot fly the long haul routes or equipment. Basic sky-pirate, flag of convenience, race to the bottom B.S. Norway is not part of the EU, Ireland in addition to being a tax and regulatory haven is a EU member, so Norwegian citizen and Norwegian Air Shuttle CEO Bjorn Kjos claims US-EU “Open Skies” treaty privileges by registering his aircraft there. The legacy airlines here in the US along with the pilots and the flight attendants union are up in arms and protesting this horrible decision. It’s going to cost the US economy a lot of good paying union jobs and hollow out another vital part of our national infrastructure. The comment period is still open if anyone wants to comment with the DOT.
I read some stuff a few days ago regarding how the Irish low cost airline ‘RyanAir’ does business with its pilots and even cynical me was shocked. They must join an LLC with other pilots whose identities are concealed and then the LLC is contracted. The individual is never hired, stripping them of any rights. Ireland is Corporate America’s wet dream.
i agree that ireland is a corporate dystopia. people pay high taxes and make heavy sacrifices so that corporations can be free. lovely people, but what have they done to their country.
“The Indebted Way We Live”
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/my-secret-shame/476415/
Could Neil Gabler’s financial problems have anything to do with his most famous book?
“An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood.”
The topic is the careers of several prominent Jewish movie producers in the early years of Hollywood. Author Neal Gabler focuses on the psychological motivations of these film moguls, arguing that their background as Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe shaped their careers and influenced the movies they made…”
Well, that’s a great way to get on the modern day Blacklist.
It was only natural.
Had Japanese or Chinese immigrants got to make big budget films early, we would have a lot more great, blockbuster Buddhist epics.
Or, in another case, masterpieces about the last of great prophets.
Is there a modern day Blacklist? Is Neil Gabler on it? Are there articles about that . . . linkable to?
Has Gabler been denied work ever since that book?
Yes, Susan the other, a dead bird does have consciousness. It is not the consciousness we associate with life, but the consciousness of death. The consciousness of decay. As the research says, “… consciousness (is) present in nonliving arrangements of matter to varying degrees.” OK. Makes good sense to me. It just progresses along the same continuum of entropy as the rest of us, but without the heartbeat. Consciousness is electromagnetic; nuclear. So remember, a single electron has a capacity of 50,000 volts. And we know particles have feelings and awareness because they can communicate with a former soul mate across the entire universe, sending each other spinning in opposite directions. It is a very emotional place, this place we inhabit.
There have been persistent anomalies with the exit polls not matching up to actual results throughout the primary season, with the results always favoring Hillary, often by unprecedented margins. I don’t know so much that the campaign mismanaged expectations as that the official tallies aren’t the actual vote counts, even notwithstanding the 100,000+ who were illegally thrown off rolls.
One reason the results don’t mesh as well in cites, possibly–the DNC machine stronger there, fewer people know what their neighbors did, no matter how many people you know you still can’t know a very high %, all these things making cheating way less obvious/less likely to provoke an outcry?
This would go along with w/”anomalies” in WY (all the ridiculous #’s of medically unable to attend people going for HRC, by 100% n some counties, while Bernie won able to attend people 6 to 1), MA (the exit polls showed him winning a close one, iirc, & the spots with handcounted paper ballots goint to Bernie by 17% while HRC won the other kind of ballots), NV, either WY or WA where the HRC supporter caught carrying off Bernie ballots who said she was going to get cupcakes, the polls showing SC vastly closer than official tallies, etc etc. Funny how these anomalies keep tilting in one direction. I will not recognize her as legit at this point under any circumstances. The entire current DNC leadership must go or the party itself must go.
This is a down day.
Intel is laying off 12,000 employees. I was a small cog in the revolution that eliminated typing pools and created technocrats servicing the Elite on their computers in endless cubicles. This is acknowledgment that Moore’s law has died and that personnel innovation and increased productivity is finished. All that is left is data mining and rent collection.
The all-volunteer army fails to win wars. True. This is not a flaw. It is part and parcel of the grand scheme to divert public money into the accounts of the connected. Peace is not mentioned by anyone anymore except the Pope. The tragedy of the NY primary is that it appears that the only hope of ending the forever wars is Donald Trump. There is nothing sadder than friends dying for no good reason.
When war is profitable, it will continue to draw talented men and women into its service.
Was is not profitable if victims are entitled to reparations.
War is not profitable, if weapon makers and gun makers can be sued.
When the cost becomes too high, it will cease to be.
It’s all about money, whatever money is (we can argue all day about it).
This made my day – Tone-deaf artisanal liberals and kickass Latinos:
‘Hope everyone pukes on your artisanal treats’: fighting gentrification, LA-style
Funnily enough this is my ‘hood, no problems whatsoever and some of the most kickass Mexican food known to man…
It’s easy to roll with the locals – just don’t be an entitled white rich asshole (apparently they are the majority in hell-a…I, as an expat white Brit of Scandinavian descent has absolutely zero issues). I have been handed more free drinks by people I can’t even speak to effectively in this part of town than anywhere else I have been…
Edit: wtf is skynet moderating THIS comment for??
“kickass,” probably.
https://www.instagram.com/hummingbirdsxoxo/
o Scientists want to use nanobots to suck pollutants from the ocean Business Insider | (David L) — Resulting in a new and far worse form of ocean pollution, dead/rogue pollutant-eating nanobots. Especially once they strat self-replicating!
o Antibiotics Have Given Us Untreatable Gonorrhea | Motherboard — Are the MoBo staff referring to themselves, or to the world at large?
o EU is unpopular because it meddles, admits Juncker | Telegraph — But is said unpopularity dire enough for Mr. Juncker to start lying, according to his self-admitted-in-wake-of-the-GFC modus operandi?
o Sanders beat Trump in NY by over 200,000 votes | Angry Bear — This gets my vote for inane headline des Tages.
o Criminal charges today in Flint water crisis Detroit Free Press — So we can look forward to tearful courtroom confessions about the various “missteps which occurred”?
So we can look forward to tearful courtroom confessions about the various “missteps which occurred
In the theme of this amazing clip of HRC testimony “I take full responsibility, subordinates will be sacked”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jriU_cPU9Vk
Rand Paul Destroys Hillary Clinton Over Benghazi-Gate During Capitol Hill Press Conference