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Sanders won the most votes in Iowa, the most votes and delegates in New Hampshire, and a commanding victory in Nevada—the most representative, diverse electorate of the early states—across divisions of race, class, and language. Though his second-place finish in South Carolina indicates Sanders still has work to do with African American voters, national polls show him currently leading in every demographic except voters over 55 and beating Trump convincingly in every head-to-head matchup. What is perhaps most exciting about the Sanders campaign is his commitment to expanding the electorate, which could produce a sweeping victory for his presidential campaign and congressional Democrats this fall.


That is the promise and possibility of the Sanders campaign—whether you call him a democratic socialist or a New Deal Democrat. Even as the corporate media ignores his achievements, denigrates his chances, and magnifies his every misstep, Sanders has two weapons none of his competitors can match or deflect. The first is his consistency. One reason Sanders won 67 percent of the vote in his last Senate campaign in Vermont, easily outpolling the Republican governor who was elected at the same time, is that even voters who disagree with him know he means what he says. Biden has to lie about getting arrested in support of South Africa’s black freedom struggle. Sanders was actually getting arrested in America’s black freedom struggle before Biden was old enough to vote. As we find ourselves on a hinge of history—a generation summoned to the task of redeeming our democracy and restoring our republic—no one ever has to wonder what Bernie Sanders stands for.

The other weapon is the movement, with its overwhelming appeal to young voters and its determination to mobilize the disenfranchised and the disenchanted. Movements are more important than candidates and are a greater source of power for change than election results. We live in an age of state repression and voter suppression, when a rigged system, complicit politicians and a depleted and chronically distracted press have allowed the greatest concentration of economic and political power in American history. Yet resistance is always an option. And an imperative. So long as we are many and they are few, hope remains both rational and realistic.

In this election the fundamental question is also the oldest one: Which side are you on? The Nation is on the side of hope, not fear. We’re on the side of radical change, not retrenchment and retreat. We are proud and excited to stand with the movements that have brought us to this moment and made this amazing, terrifying, exhilarating, and empowering campaign possible. And we are proud to endorse Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist with a program realistic and radical enough to meet the test of our time, for president of the United States.

Soooper genius...

[blockquoteDozens of interviews with Democratic establishment leaders this week show that they are not just worried about Mr. Sanders’s candidacy, but are also willing to risk intraparty damage to stop his nomination at the national convention in July if they get the chance. Since Mr. Sanders’s victory in Nevada’s caucuses on Saturday, The Times has interviewed 93 party officials — all of them superdelegates, who could have a say on the nominee at the convention — and found overwhelming opposition to handing the Vermont senator the nomination if he arrived with the most delegates but fell short of a majority.


[link:https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/us/politics/democratic-superdelegates.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage|]

WASHINGTON—As the beginning of primary season upped the stakes in their search for an alternative candidate, Democratic National Committee officials reportedly mulled Monday asking Donald Trump to run for president as a Democrat in an effort to stop Bernie Sanders. “He’s obviously not our first choice, but Trump has a track record of winning elections, not to mention he does well with the conservative voters we’ll need to swing some red states blue—if that’s who we need to ask to ensure Bernie doesn’t win, we’ll do it,” said DNC chairman Tom Perez, who had circled Trump’s name on a white board listing dozens of potential candidates the party could try to convince to jump into the Democratic Party primaries in order to obstruct a Sanders nomination.

“This late in the game, we need somebody with name recognition and a built-in following, which Trump definitely has. He has political experience working with Republicans, which will help him win over moderate voters who are turned off by the idea of a socialist president. Plus, he’ll have the backing of the Democratic donor base, who generally prefer him to Sanders. Look, sometimes politics makes strange bedfellows, but I think I speak for party leadership when I say that we’d much rather see Donald Trump than Bernie Sanders as the Democratic nominee.” At press time, Perez was in negotiations to ensure Trump was on every Democratic primary ballot for Super Tuesday and changing the requirements to allow Trump to qualify for the next Democratic debate.

[link:https://politics.theonion.com/dnc-mulls-asking-donald-trump-to-run-as-democrat-in-eff-1841432132|

Former secretary of state claims "nobody likes" Vermont senator, currently a leading presidential Democratic candidate and the most popular elected politician in the country.

CNN political analyst Chris Cillizza argued Clinton's attack was actually "great news for" Sanders:

Sanders is running this 2020 presidential campaign (as he did the 2016 campaign) on a simple premise: the powerful have been sitting comfortably for way too long and it's time to shake things up. Sanders was vilifying the elites and the political establishment (of both parties) long before Donald Trump even started considering running for president.

This is who Sanders is; it's who he has always been. It's at the core of why people support him and why he has been able to build a movement around his back-to-back presidential candidacies.

Guess who, for lots and lots of Sanders supporters (and even other Democrats who don't support him) epitomizes that elite establishment? The Clintons!

While the Sanders campaign had yet to respond to Clinton's comments, Cillizza recommended Sanders should send her "a thank you note for the well-timed attack."

Jewish Currents news editor David Klion tweeted that the interview was another indication of the lasting legacy of Clinton and her husband, Bill Clinton, the 43rd president.

"Start to finish, one of the most selfish, petty, nihilistic, counterproductive careers in American political history," said Klion. "Every time they open their mouths it makes things worse. History will not remember the Clintons fondly."

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/01/21/inexcusable-hillary-clinton-who-lost-trump-2016-wont-commit-helping-bernie-sanders

After CNN’s debate ambush and MSNBC’s body-language analysis, loathing of media is becoming a crossover phenomenon

Just a few elections ago, the national press policed the boundaries of both Democrat and Republican politics. You couldn’t sniff either party’s nomination without media assent.

After more high-profile crackups, including a few over the weekend, the press might be months from being pushed all the way to the outside of a general election campaign. Having declared war on Donald Trump and his voters years ago, news outlets are committing to a similar pile-on of Bernie Sanders.

Maybe this will end as an inspirational unity story, like Independence Day, when an invasion of gross aliens brought America together. At present, it just seems short-sighted.

The low point came Saturday, when Joy Reid on MSNBC’s AM Joy show had on a “body language expert” named Janine Driver to declare Sanders a liar, because his posture reminds her of a turtle. There’s not much to say about this except it’s the same combo of junk forensics and yellow journalism that Bill O’Reilly made infamous.

.......

[link:https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/media-bernie-sanders-donald-trump-david-brooks-940213/?fbclid=IwAR1NItSPN63kkPWYiy_rM5zfpcBEDT1zNYznsqXNAmI-leB68eOnlj9xIRw|

WASHINGTON, DC – Following revelations in a new documentary that Hillary Clinton does not support Bernie Sanders, the Sanders campaign office has responded with great relief that they have managed to avoid their greatest potential threat to securing the 2020 Democratic nomination.

“Bernie has been polling very well, but everybody on Team Sanders knew that we were one Clinton endorsement away from losing everything,” stated senior campaign official Ron McMeel. “We already avoided the threat of a New York Times endorsement, so now everybody here at headquarters has decided to take the rest of the afternoon off and get day drunk.”

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders were adversaries in 2016, and many political analysts expected their past rivalry to lead Clinton to sabotage the Sanders campaign by endorsing it.


“Thankfully, much like when Hillary put aside her past differences with President Obama to serve as his Secretary of State,” explained McMeel, “she was able to look past the fact that Sanders was once her opponent in order to provide today’s pivotal un-dorsement.”

In related news, Joe Biden is reported to be actively seeking an endorsement from Clinton, and has offered to “hug her for as long as it takes” to get one.



[link:https://www.thebeaverton.com/2020/01/sanders-campaign-relieved-to-have-dodged-clinton-endorsement/|

"Britons in a video released Tuesday expressed incredulity and shock at the high cost of healthcare in the United States and thanked the United Kingdom's publicly-funded and administered National Health Service for sparing the country's people such exorbitant prices.

"So if you're poor, you're dead," one young woman tells the interviewer from Joe Politics after hearing an asthma inhaler in the for-profit U.S. system costs between $250 and $300.

Two different men appear shocked when told Americans can be charged $2,500 for an ambulance ride.

"For real?" one asks. "Why?" asks another."

[link:https://twitter.com/i/status/1201826927520161792|


[link:https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/12/03/so-if-youre-poor-youre-dead-watch-these-brits-gasp-when-they-find-out-cost?fbclid=IwAR2hj6c8qF5sPDb2n1YbHxkbxyOf48y1gxy2hlvWgCvxprKF-JNKIgHWl78#|

"“He has absolutely infuriated the liberal establishment by committing a major crime,” Chomsky said, explaining that the Democratic elite is not opposed to Sanders just because they don’t like his policies, but because he has managed to build a powerful movement of activists willing to participate in the political process.

“His crime was to organize an ongoing political movement that doesn’t just show up at the polls every four years and push a button, but keeps working. That’s no good. The rabble is supposed to stay home.”


"... But, according to Chomsky, the term (socialist) has been rendered meaningless. In the United States, he said, it is understood as New Deal liberalism promoted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Sanders is neither a socialist nor a democratic socialist, Chomsky argued, but a progressive, New Deal Democrat, whose policies would not be considered out of the ordinary in the 1950s, not even by Republicans such as Dwight D. Eisenhower.

“To be quite frank, his major policies would not have surprised President Eisenhower very much,” the political commentator noted, explaining that Sanders’ proposals are considered radical by the political mainstream because both parties have “shifted so far to the right.”


Read more: ]

Original source [link:https://theintercept.com/2019/10/31/deconstructed-special-the-noam-chomsky-interview/|

"Lazy journalists, milquetoast Democratic strategists, and citizens of curiosity and conscience should take note that the illuminative story of domestic politics is not how the prominence of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or the popularity of Warren and Sanders, is proof that the Democratic Party has drifted off the edge of the “far left,” but that the far right has so thoroughly succeeded in moving the country’s political culture away from the center that the moderate policies of the 1970s now apparently resemble Fidel Castro’s revolutionary agenda."

[link:https://www.salon.com/2019/10/26/the-conservatism-of-bernie-sanders-elizabeth-warren-and-alexandria-ocasio-cortez/?fbclid=IwAR077P6lIvrbwFQjQmZ5R_-qnlq1O_OkGbq0rBjzawb7Uekz0-WXQtXxE2Y|