January 29, 2016

Bernie wins the Super-Pac spending contest! According to the Federal Election Commission,

more Super-pac money has been spent to support Bernie than on either HRC or MOM.

The nurses have been spending more on Bernie than Planned Parenthood and the League of Conservation Voters have been spending on Hillary.

And in addition to being the candidate who has most benefited from money spent in direct Super-Pac funds, he has also gained in indirect support. Conservative Super-pacs have spent millions attacking Hillary.

Ironic, isn’t it?

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/29/us/politics/bernie-sanders-is-democrats-top-beneficiary-of-outside-spending-like-it-or-not.html

But the union is not just busing nurses into Iowa. The union’s “super PAC” has spent close to $1 million on ads and other support for Mr. Sanders, the Democratic presidential candidate who has inspired liberal voters with his calls to eradicate such outside groups. In fact, more super PAC money has been spent so far in express support of Mr. Sanders than for either of his Democratic rivals, including Hillary Clinton, according to Federal Election Commission records.


SNIP

Mr. Sander’s unlikely rise to super PAC pre-eminence is, in part, the story of an unusual alignment of strategies by different outside groups, including Republican ones eager to bloody Mrs. Clinton and lift Mr. Sanders, whom conservatives believe will be easier to defeat in a general election. While the nurses’ super PAC is the biggest left-leaning outside spender in the Democratic primary, conservative organizations have also spent at least $4.3 million attacking Mrs. Clinton in recent months.

One recent online ad from the Republican super PAC American Crossroads has assailed Mrs. Clinton for her Wall Street speaking fees — echoing an argument Mr. Sanders often makes against her. Another conservative group, Ending Spending, bankrolled by the Wyoming billionaire Joe Ricketts, has begun a $600,000 campaign in Iowa highlighting Mr. Sanders’s promises to raise taxes on the rich and provide free public college tuition, calling him “too liberal for Iowa.” But the ad’s language and imagery, including a contented-looking superrich couple hugging in front of a mansion and expensive cars, has led some Democrats to believe it is actually meant to bolster Mr. Sanders.

SNIP

Priorities USA has continued to husband most of its money for later in the campaign, however, in anticipation of a major general election battle with Mrs. Clinton as the nominee. Several other liberal groups have spent money on behalf of Mrs. Clinton, including Planned Parenthood’s political arm and the League of Conservation Voters. But those expenditures totaled only $847,000, according to spending reported to the elections commission through Monday, less than the amount spent by the nurses’ super PAC, National Nurses United for Patient Protection.

January 29, 2016

Monmouth U. in Iowa: Clinton 47, Sanders, 42, O'Malley, 5.

Margin of error, 4.4.

So they're still neck and neck. Every caucus vote will count.

(Though they won't count proportionately -- the weight of each vote will depend on how many people voted in the precinct during the last Presidential election.)

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/01/poll-iowa-democrats-218323

Women in the latest sample preferred Clinton to Sanders, 50 percent to 38 percent. But Sanders did better among men, 46 percent of whom said they choose him over Clinton, with 43 percent.

Age also seemed to be a factor: Clinton led Sanders among those 50 and older, 54 percent to 34 percent, while Sanders had the upper hand with those younger than 50 — 59 percent to Clinton's 31 percent.

The standings have solidified since December as 55 percent of those surveyed said they are “completely decided” — up from 41 percent in December — and 30 percent indicated a “strong preference.” Just 8 percent were undecided.


Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/01/poll-iowa-democrats-218323#ixzz3ybNpP7Cc

January 29, 2016

NYTimes article about "Southside with You" -- the fictional movie about the Obamas.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/28/t-magazine/entertainment/obama-sundance-film-southside-with-you-parker-sawyers-tika-sumpter.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=mini-moth®ion=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below&_r=0

In preparing to film “Southside With You,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this week, Parker Sawyers and Tika Sumpter had some impressive shoes to fill. In the film, they play Barack and Michelle Obama (née Robinson) as they were in 1989: he, a Harvard Law summer associate at a prestigious Chicago firm, and she, an ambitious young lawyer and his adviser. Telling the story of their first date, it’s the first major depiction of the Obamas in a feature film, and Sawyers and Sumpter portray the future first couple with such sweetness and magnetism that you’d be forgiven for thinking them an item offscreen. But it didn’t come without baggage. “I was worried that the CIA would come shut us down!” Sumpter says, laughing. “It is the leader of the free world, after all.”

January 29, 2016

Newsweek: Advocacy groups call foul on Sanders campaign in Iowa, Nevada

According to reports, his campaign has used without permission the logos of AARP -- even though AARP hasn't endorsed anyone -- and the League of Conservation voters, which endorsed Hillary. How could this be an accident?

And now the Culinary Workers Union says that campaign workers have been wearing buttons falsely identifying themselves as union members and entering union facilities and campaigning while wearing those union buttons.

http://www.newsweek.com/sanders-complaints-iowa-nevada-420806

Senator Bernie Sanders has built his insurgent presidential bid around being Mr. Clean, but several outside groups are now accusing his campaign of playing dirty.

Sanders’s campaign in Iowa has included League of Conservation Voters and AARP logos in recent mailers it’s sent to prospective caucusgoers, a subtle effort to tie himself to those groups, if not implying an endorsement. But neither group has backed him. The AARP, which represents retirees, does not endorse candidates, and the League of Conservative Voters, an environmental advocacy group, is supporting Sanders’s Democratic foe, Hillary Clinton.

And now news has broken of what is potentially an even more bald-faced deception, in Nevada, where Sanders supporters have reportedly been posing as members of Las Vegas’s powerful Culinary Workers Union Local 226 to try to rally labor support ahead of the state’s Democratic caucuses on February 20.

SNIP

The Sanders campaign could spin those as honest mistakes, but given how much thought campaigns put into their advertising and the messages they’re trying to convey, that requires some credulity. It will be harder to explain away how campaign supporters knowingly deceived hotel workers on the Las Vegas Strip to gain access to employee-only areas, as veteran Nevada politics scribe Jon Ralston is reporting.

January 29, 2016

Weaver claims Bernie's non-union workers were sporting union buttons "in solidarity"

with the Culinary Union workers whose buildings they entered and whom they were trying to recruit.

Leaders of the Culinary Union -- which till now had firmly decided to endorse NO ONE -- "strongly condemn anyone falsifying their affiliation with the Culinary Union in order to gain access to properties and we will cooperate with casinos and hotels so that this matter is fully resolved."

What the campaign doesn't acknowledge is that while Union employees would be free to wear Bernie buttons (if individual members were supporters), non-union Bernie workers are not free to wear union buttons. Doing so falsely identifies them as union members.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/28/politics/bernie-sanders-union-nevada-culinary-union/index.html

Des Moines, Iowa (CNN)Nevada's powerful Culinary Union on Thursday accused Bernie Sanders' campaign staffers of posing as union workers in an attempt to gain access to their members, a charge the Sanders campaign denies.

Union representatives said Thursday that multiple members of their union have reported Sanders' campaign staffers of "attempting and gaining access to employee dining rooms at Las Vegas Strip properties."


SNIP

Weaver confirmed that the Sanders staffers were wearing the culinary union button "in solidarity with people but they were also wearing Bernie paraphernalia."

SNIP

"The Culinary Union button that hundreds of thousands of union members have proudly worn to work every day represents 80 years of struggle and fighting for justice," Kline added. "We strongly condemn anyone falsifying their affiliation with the Culinary Union in order to gain access to properties and we will cooperate with casinos and hotels so that this matter is fully resolved."

January 28, 2016

Dana Milbank: I LOVE Bernie. And Democrats would be INSANE to nominate him.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/democrats-would-be-insane-to-nominate-bernie-sanders/2016/01/26/0590e624-c472-11e5-a4aa-f25866ba0dc6_story.html

. . . . And I doubt Democrats will make an anti-immigrant bigot the president by nominating a socialist to run against him.

Sanders and his supporters boast of polls showing him, on average, matching up slightly better against Trump than Clinton does. But those matchups are misleading: Opponents have been attacking and defining Clinton for a quarter- century, but nobody has really gone to work yet on demonizing Sanders.

Watching Sanders at Monday night’s Democratic presidential forum in Des Moines, I imagined how Trump — or another Republican nominee — would disembowel the relatively unknown Vermonter.

SNIP

But that’s not how Republicans will define socialism — and they’ll have the dictionary on their side. They’ll portray Sanders as one who wants the government to own and control major industries and the means of production and distribution of goods. They’ll say he wants to take away private property. That wouldn’t be fair, but it would be easy. Socialists don’t win national elections in the United States .

Sanders on Monday night also admitted he would seek massive tax increases — “one of the biggest tax hikes in history,” as moderator Chris Cuomo put it — to expand Medicare to all. Sanders, this time making a comparison with Britain and France, allowed that “hypothetically, you’re going to pay $5,000 more in taxes,” and declared, “W e will raise taxes, yes we will.” He said this would be offset by lower health-insurance premiums and protested that “it’s demagogic to say, oh, you’re paying more in taxes.”

Well, yes — and Trump is a demagogue.

January 28, 2016

Pregnant women and babies drank poisoned water while MI State Employees living in Flint

were given bottled water -- for a year or more.

http://gawker.com/email-michigan-officials-gave-state-employees-bottled-1755785870

In January 2015, amid concerns about the drinking water quality in Flint, Michigan, employees at the state’s Department of Technology, Management & Budget were given coolers of bottled water on each floor of their office space. Ordinary Flint residents were not extended the same courtesy until a year later.

Documents from the organization Progress Michigan show emails exchanged between employees of the state’s Department of Environmental Quality. “Appears certain state departments are concerned with Flint’s WQ,” one reads. Attached is a notice, dated January 7, to Department of Technology, Management & Budget workers about their new water coolers. It reads:

January 28, 2016

"Bernie Bro Just Wondering Who Her Royal Highness Michelle Obama Thinks She Is Anyway"

http://wonkette.com/598261/bernie-bro-just-wondering-who-her-royal-highness-michelle-obama-thinks-she-is-anyway


This young man called Michael Sainato offers no examples to prove his assertion that Michelle Obama is “insincere, yet polished” and indistinguishable from the first ladies before her. That might require a full minute of Googling to learn thing one about the country’s first African-American (but totally status quo) first lady, and how can a young earnest Sanders supporter be expected to find the time in his busy schedule of drawing “I heart Bernie” on his notebook?

Had he bothered even to read the one link he provided in his own post, he might have learned that Michelle grew up in “a one-bedroom apartment” on the South Side of Chicago — but the affluent part, we are sure. This daughter of a secretary and a city water plant worker, a descendant of slaves, must have enjoyed quite the pampered upbringing — unlike her superior, Jane O’Meara Sanders:



While Michelle was gallivanting about at Princeton and then Harvard Law, like a typical black woman who takes her silver-platter privilege for granted, Jane Sanders was giving back to The People as a “community youth organizer for the City of Burlington.”


SNIP



http://www.mediaite.com/online/pro-bernie-sanders-huffpo-freelancer-picked-the-wrong-michelle-obama-to-mess-with/

Or maybe he picked the right one. For the past day or so, my Twitter feed has been popping with angry tweets about some pro-Bernie Sanders blogger at The Huffington Post slamming First Lady Michelle Obama, while arguing in favor of a Jane Sanders First Ladyship. Nobody was linking the piece, though, so it wasn’t until I saw it at Wonkette this morning that I was able to evaluate this bizarre bit of political trolling for myself.

The author of the piece, Michael Sainato, has managed to create a specimen of cliché Bernie Sanders supporter so pure, it could have been extracted from the brain stem of an Obama voter and grown in a laboratory. What’s the only thing left for a Sanders supporter to do to alienate black voters after snippily lecturing them about civil rights? How about attacking Michelle Obama, does that do it for you?

SNIP

January 28, 2016

A Rethug Fox news commentator wrote "We are Witnessing the End of the House of Clinton."

When Bernie Sanders's spokesman yesterday asked his supporters to treat Hillary Clinton with respect, he didn't mean for them to publicize hit pieces on her written by Rethugs.

January 28, 2016

Some important information about lead absorption and NUTRITION.

Not all lead that is consumed gets absorbed into the body. Malnourished children are at even greater risk than other children.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10027567646