ED PILKINGTON, THE GUARDIAN
13 MAR 2016 AT 08:32 ET

In this most bizarre of presidential election cycles, every day seems to bring another jaw-dropping development. Donald Trump on the size of his genitals, Ben Carson and the Egyptian pyramids, Bernie Sanders’ socialist revolution, Hillary Clinton and the cloth she used to wipe her private email server clean.

But it’s not just the candidates who have raised eyebrows in 2016.

Related: It’s not over til it’s over: inside the Sanders campaign’s do-or-die moment

The latest startling phenomenon is the voter who is feeling the Bern, but also has eyes for the Donald.

This week the Guardian invited Sanders fans to come forward who are contemplating switching allegiance to Trump if Hillary Clinton secures the Democratic nomination.

Almost 700 people replied to the internet call-out, and some 500 of them

said they were thinking the unthinkable – a Sanders-Trump switch.

They explained their unconventional position by expressing a variety of passionately held views on their shared commitment for protecting workers and against new wars, on their zeal for an alternative to the establishment, and on their desire to support anyone-but-Hillary Clinton.

As one respondent, a 34-year-old male IT technician, put it: “Bernie and Trump agree a lot on healthcare, Iraq war, campaign finance and trade. I really want to move on to something new, new ideas from outside the box. Maybe Donald Trump can provide that.”

The Guardian call-out was not a poll, but controlled surveys by polling companies have identified this small but not insignificant slice of the Sanders crowd who would consider backing Trump.

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/03/feeling-the-bern-for-trump-sanders-voters-may-turn-their-backs-on-hillary/comments/

Watching the scenes unfold last night from Chicago and elsewhere, it became obvious that, largely as many of us have feared, Donald Trump is indeed leading the United States merrily down the path to an outbreak of not-kidding-honest-to-God-real thing fascism or proto-fascism, all without himself being a hardened fascist ideologue, but rather a right-wing populist demagogue. Then again, the two phenomena are only degrees apart, and that is what we are now seeing on the streets of the American political landscape.

Of course, while it was fairly clear that the protesters were peaceful until attacked by the Trump rally-goers, the reality also was that fighting eventually broke out on all sides and there was violence all around. Naturally, that meant that the media were already out there flogging their favorite "both sides do it" narrative.

Never mind that Trump has specifically encouraged the violence, telling reporters at a press conference that "we need a little bit more of that."


The story we'll be fed as at least "the other side" will be Trump's: that the leftist "thugs" were responsible for the violence. And we all can see where this is going: As justification for further and more intense violence.

There is a long history of this with the fascist and proto-fascist right. Indeed, martyrdom at the hands of the "violent left" was a cornerstone of early Nazi propaganda, of which the above poster is only a small sample. And a version of it helped fuel the post-Civil War Jim-Crow-and-Klan rule of the South.

http://crooksandliars.com/2016/03/violence-begets-violence-just-way-they-it

John Antoine, 86, files a lawsuit against the city police for a wrongful arrest.
Mar. 11,2016

86-year-old John Antoine, who resides in Brooklyn, says police invaded in his home and zapped him with a Taser while he was in his kitchen cooking his meal.

On October 14, Antoine was in the kitchen with a knife in his hands as he was in the process of cooking, when police budged into his apartment. According to the police, the chase was on a 23-year-old boyfriend of Antoine’s granddaughter who was mentally disturbed.

The police, sighting the man with knife, without order or questioning tasered him and arrested because he was a threat since there was a knife in his hands. This is the dubious excuse of the police for doing what they did.

John Antoine has been acquitted of charges and a sum of $5M dollars is expected to compensate him for an unlawful arrested and misconduct by the police force.

https://blackmattersus.com/4568-cooking-soup-nearly-ended-me-in-jail-86-year-old-man-says/

GOP Senator: Of Course We'd Consider SCOTUS Nom If Obama Were Republican!

Updated at 3:00 p.m. ET

During a Thursday morning radio interview, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) candidly explained that Senate Republicans would take a different approach to a Supreme Court nominee if a Republican president were in office and replacing a conservative justice.

Johnson was asked on Wisconsin radio show "Morning Mess" about Senate Republicans' refusal to consider President Obama's forthcoming nomination to the Supreme Court. The host hypothesized that things would be different if Mitt Romney were in the White House.

"It’s a different situation," Johnson said. "Generally, and this is the way it works out politically, if you’re replacing — if a conservative president’s replacing a conservative justice, there’s a little more accommodation to it."

"But when you’re talking about a conservative justice now being replaced by a liberal president who would literally flip the court — you know, let’s face it, I don’t think anybody’s under any illusion — President Obama’s nominee would flip the court from a 5-4 conservative to a 5-4 liberal controlled court," the senator continued. "And that’s the concern, is that our Second Amendment rights to keep and bear arms, our First Amendment rights to free speech and religious liberty, will be threatened. And so it’s an incredibly serious moment in terms of what’s the composition of the court going to be."

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/ron-johnson-republicans-scotus