January 28, 2016

Bernie To WAPO: 'Check out where all the geniuses on the editorial page were with invasion of Iraq'

Sanders shot back when contacted by the Post for a response.

“People are telling us, whether it’s the Washington Post editorial board or anybody else, our ideas are too ambitious — can’t happen,” Sanders responded. “Too bold — really? Well, here’s something which is really bold. In the last 30 years, there has been a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class and working families of this country. The middle class has become poorer and trillions of dollars have been transferred to the top one-tenth of 1 percent… Where was The Washington Post to express concern that the middle class was shrinking?”

But that retort apparently wasn’t enough for Sanders.

According to The Hill, Sanders lashed out again during a Bloomberg Politics breakfast, saying of the Post’s editorial board, “check out where all the geniuses on the editorial page were with regard to the invasion of Iraq.”

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/01/bernie-sanders-just-hit-back-at-the-washington-post-with-the-most-perfect-jab/

January 28, 2016

CNN, Trump spox can't name 1veterans group that will be receiving money raised from tonight's event

Trump schedules event to rival Fox News debate

Just now on CNN, Trump spox can't name one veterans group that will be receiving money raised from tonight's event

https://twitter.com/elliosch/status/692817907244515330

At a pre-rally press conference Tuesday, Trump told reporters he planned to organize a charity event for the Wounded Warrior Project to help injured war veterans, but it remained unclear if the organization was involved in the special event unveiled Wednesday.

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/267263-trump-announces-veterans-charity-event-to-rival-fox-news-debate

A N D!!!

Donald Trump Wanted Vets Kicked Off Fifth Avenue

Instead of debating his presidential rivals Thursday, the GOP frontrunner is hosting an event ‘to raise money’ for veterans. That’s rich, say the disabled veterans he tried to eject from the street outside Trump Tower.

Now that he has balked at facing Megyn Kelly at the Republican debate, Donald Trump will be embracing heroes.

“Trump]will instead host an event in Iowa to raise money for the Veterans and Wounded Warriors, who have been treated so horribly by our all talk, no action politicians,” the Trump campaign announced.

Never mind that for more than a decade Trump sought to deprive veterans in need of their meager livelihood because he found them unsightly nuisances who should not be allowed anywhere near his gleaming headquarters on Fifth Avenue.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/01/28/donald-trump-wanted-vets-kicked-off-fifth-avenue.html

January 28, 2016

Lincoln High School student gets perfect score on AP Calculus exam -- 1 of 12 in the world to do so

Lincoln High School student gets perfect score on AP Calculus exam -- 1 of 12 in the world to do so



http://www.trbimg.com/img-56a9811f/turbine/la-cedrick-calculus-la0034074410-20160127/700/700x394

It turned out that Cedrick, the son of a Salvadoran maintenance worker and a Filipina nurse, had scored perfectly on his Advanced Placement Calculus exam. Of the 302,531 students to take the notoriously mind-crushing test, he was one of only 12 to earn every single point.

“It’s crazy,” Cedrick said. “Twelve people in the whole world to do this and I was one of them? It’s amazing.”

Since word of his feat has spread, the lanky 17-year-old senior – who described himself as a quiet, humble guy – has become something of a celebrity at Lincoln High, a school of about 1,200 students in the heavily Latino Lincoln Heights neighborhood.

At a school assembly, students shouted, “Ced-rick! Ced-rick!” when Principal Jose Torres announced his score. Friends started calling him “One of Twelve.

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-calculus-wiz-20160127-story.html

January 28, 2016

CHARLES P. PIERCE: What The Washington Post (and Nearly Everyone) Gets Wrong About Bernie Sanders

What The Washington Post (and Nearly Everyone) Gets Wrong About Bernie Sanders
Every presidential campaign is necessary aspirational.



.................

........The problem with both the international economic forces and the corrupt campaign system is not that "many Americans" are in favor of them. It's that "many Americans" don't know what they can do about either one. Which, basically, is the reason that Sanders–and He, Trump–are prospering in the first place.

We move along through some completely predictable deficit hawkery and some Euro-bashing. (The Post loves the austerity imposed on European nations, but is uncomfortable with all that icky national education policy and universal health care.) But then we get to the basic creed of the Church of the Savvy.

Mr. Sanders tops off his narrative with a deus ex machina: He assures Democrats concerned about the political obstacles in the way of his agenda that he will lead a "political revolution" that will help him clear the capital of corruption and influence-peddling. This self-regarding analysis implies a national consensus favoring his agenda when there is none and ignores the many legitimate checks and balances in the political system that he cannot wish away.

How this makes Sanders different from every other candidate in the field is beyond me. Assuming that the makeup of the Congress remains the same, or even assuming that the Democrats manage to win a razor-thin majority in the Senate, there is no indication from recent history that President Hillary Rodham Clinton will be treated any differently than either President Bernie Sanders or the guy who has the job at the moment. She claims that her financial-reform package is tougher than both the existing Dodd-Frank regime and the proposals put forth by Sanders. If we assume that to be the case, then her proposal is as dead as Kelsey's nuts in the House of Representatives. So, by the way, would be any attempt to use the Affordable Care Act as a stepping-stone to true universal health-care.

Why only Sanders is held to this Procrustean standard of aspirational politics is an interesting question. His proposals may seem a bit blue-sky, but are they really as improbable as Ted Cruz's promises to roll us back to the Counter-Reformation, or Marco Rubio's threats to go to war in Iran, or Jeb (!) Bush's sudden lust for a second Constitutional Convention? Every single Republican candidate is pledged to the death to defend the complete fiction that is supply-side economics. (Even this editorial grudgingly concedes this point, albeit for the purposes of yet another cheap shot at Sanders.) Does this cult-like devotion assume a "national consensus favoring" that agenda? Of course, it does. Because of the way our politics is conducted these days, and because of the unprecedented use of the institutional choke-points in Washington, every presidential campaign is necessarily aspirational. The idea that this is a phenomenon unique to the Sanders campaign is an indication of a very large thumb on the scale.

It merely proves that many progressives like being told everything they want to hear.

Well, that certainly makes "progressives" unique in our politics, unless you count every election ever. I went to a Ted Cruz rally on Wednesday night that had more in common with a tent revival than I was comfortable with. But "progressives" get under Fred's hide. They keep reminding him that his pet war in Iraq went horribly wrong. They keep reminding him that his beloved crusade to rejigger Social Security and Medicare will impoverish the old and kill the sick. They keep reminding him of the blog's First Law Of Economics–Fck the deficit. People Got No Jobs.

People Got No Money. And they keep reminding him that he does the Republic no favors when he gives platforms to the likes of Michael Gerson, a pious fraud, and torture-porn enthusiast Marc Thiessen. What Bernie Sanders proposes may be blue-sky stuff, but at least it's looking at the sky. It's not the shoe-gazing trudge toward oligarchy with which The Washington Post is comfortable.


MORE:http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a41608/bernie-sanders-washington-post-response/

January 28, 2016

Anne Frank’s stepsister compares Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler

“If Donald Trump become(s) the next president of the U.S. it would be a complete disaster,” she told Newsweek on Wednesday. “I think he is acting like another Hitler by inciting racism.”

.............

Schloss survived Auschwitz while Frank and her mother died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and Anne Frank’s diary became a famous account of life as a Jewish family under Hitler’s Nazi Germany.

Schloss, who lives in London, also criticized the U.S. and Western European governments for their response to the Syrian crisis, likening the refugees’ experience in 2016 “to what we went through” in Nazi-controlled Europe.

“I remember how upset the world was when the Berlin Wall was erected in 1961,” Schloss said. “And now everybody is building walls again to keep people out. It’s absurd.”


http://kfor.com/2016/01/28/anne-franks-stepsister-compares-donald-trump-to-adolf-hitler/

January 27, 2016

Michael Moore: How can you help flint? Do not send bottled water. Instead, join us in a revolt.

Many of you have contacted me wanting to know how you can help the people of Flint with the two-year long tragedy of drinking water contaminated by the radical decisions made by the Governor of Michigan. The offer is much appreciated by those who are suffering through this and who have not drank a glass of unpoisoned water since April of 2014.

Unfortunately, the honest answer to your offer of help is, sadly, you can’t.


You can't help.

The reason you can’t help is that you cannot reverse the irreversible brain damage that has been inflicted upon every single child in Flint. The damage is permanent. There is no medicine you can send, no doctor or scientist who has any way to undo the harm done to thousands of babies, toddlers and children (not to mention their parents). They are ruined for life, and someone needs to tell you the truth about that. They will, forever, suffer from various neurological impediments, their IQs will be lowered by at least 20 points, they will not do as well in school and, by the time they reach adolescence, they will exhibit various behavioral problems that will land a number of them in trouble, and some of them in jail.

That is what we know about the history of lead poisoning when you inflict it upon a child. It is a life sentence. In Flint, they’ve already ingested it for these two years, and the toll has already been taken on their developing brains. No check you write, no truckloads of Fiji Water or Poland Spring, will bring their innocence or their health back to normal. It’s done. And it was done knowingly, enacted by a political decision from a Governor and a political party charged by the majority of Michigan’s citizens who elected them to cut taxes for the rich, take over majority-black cities by replacing the elected mayors and city councils, cut costs, cut services, cut more taxes for the rich, increase taxes on retired teachers and public employees and, ultimately, try to decimate their one line of defense against all this, this thing we used to call a union.

The amount of generosity since the national media finally started to cover this story has been tremendous. Pearl Jam sent 100,000 bottles of water. The next day the Detroit Lions showed up with a truck and 100,000 bottles of water. Yesterday, Puff Daddy and Mark Wahlberg donated 1,000,000 bottles of water! Unbelievably amazing. They acknowledged it’s a very short-term fix, and that it is. Flint has 102,000 residents, each in need of an average of 50 gallons of water a day for cooking, bathing, washing clothes, doing the dishes, and drinking (I’m not counting toilet flushes, watering plants or washing the car). But 100,000 bottles of water is enough for just one bottle per person – in other words, just enough to cover brushing one’s teeth for one day. You would have to send 200 bottles a day, per person, to cover what the average American (we are Americans in Flint) needs each day. That’s 102,000 citizens times 200 bottles of water – which equals 20.4 million 16oz. bottles of water per day, every day, for the next year or two until this problem is fixed (oh, and we’ll need to find a landfill in Flint big enough for all those hundreds of millions of plastic water bottles, thus degrading the local environment even further). Anybody want to pony up for that? Because THAT is the reality.

This is a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. There is not a terrorist organization on Earth that has yet to figure out how to poison 100,000 people every day for two years – and get away with it. That took a Governor who subscribes to an American political ideology hell-bent on widening the income inequality gap and conducting various versions of voter and electoral suppression against people of color and the poor. It was those actions that led Michigan’s Republican Governor to try out his economic and racial experiment in Flint (and please don’t tell me this has nothing to do with race or class; he has removed the mayors of a number of black cities. This, and the water crisis in Flint, never would have been visited upon the residents of Bloomfield Hills or Grosse Pointe -- and everyone here knows that). We have now seen the ultimate disastrous consequences of late-20th century, neo-conservative, trickle down public policy. That word “trickle,” a water-based metaphor, was used to justify this economic theory -- well, it’s no longer a metaphor, is it? Because now we’re talking about how actual water has been used to institute these twisted economic beliefs in destroying the lives of the black and the poor in Flint, Michigan.

So, do you still want to help? Really help? Because what we need in Flint – and across the country – right now, tonight, is a nonviolent army of people who are willing to stand up for this nation, and go to bat for the forgotten of Flint.

Here’s what you and I need to do:



THE REST!!!
http://michaelmoore.com/DontSendBottledWater

January 27, 2016

Protester Throws Tomatoes at Trump After He Calls Bernie Sanders a Communist

http://usuncut.com/politics/man-throws-tomato-at-donald-trump/



these are the remnants

https://twitter.com/SopanDeb/status/692192463818203136?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

http://bipartisanreport.com/2016/01/27/watch-trump-leaves-iowa-rally-early-after-crowd-boos-and-throws-tomatoes-at-him/

January 27, 2016

Holy Shit: The latest cover of The New Yorker

"Bad Reception,” by Barry Blitt.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine

January 27, 2016

FOX, "You are dead to me now"

https://twitter.com/BarbaraJensen1/status/692177649658118144




https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/692171744845664258

January 27, 2016

It's The Misogyny Stupid

Political pundits on TV and Twitter tied themselves in knots Tuesday night trying to decipher Donald Trump's decision to withdraw from Thursday's GOP debate, the last debate before Monday's Iowa caucuses. Many deemed it a power play, a strategic decision aimed at exerting power over Fox News and his Republican rivals. Others wondered if it was just another in a long line of knee-jerk reactions from Trump. But no one seemed to point out the obvious.

It's about misogyny.

Trump is boycotting the debate at least in part because it's co-moderated by Megyn Kelly, a Fox News anchor he feels personally slighted him in the first Republican primary debate in August. Kelly's crime? She asked Trump to account for his temperament, given his practice of condemning women with whom he disagreed as "fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals."

A subsequent months-long meltdown ensued – Trump lashing out and stomping his feet in protest that a woman had the gall to publicly reference his previous disparaging attacks against women. (Let's pause for a moment and savor how Trump's incessant whining serves only to verify the sexist nature he's so desperate to deny.)


MUCH MORE:
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/opinion-blog/articles/2016-01-27/misogyny-is-behind-donald-trumps-boycott-of-fox-debate-with-megyn-kelly