She wins Illinois

Please don't vote for the Green Party candidate Jill Stein...

....if Bernie or Hillary doesn't win the nomination.

I had never heard of her so I had to do some reading. Jill Stein is about as qualified to be President as Ben Carson. Like Carson she is physician.

Unlike Carson, she has run for several offices over the last 14 years - Massachusetts House of Representatives, Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth, Governor of Massachusetts, and President of the United States on Green Party ticket in 2012. She lost each of those races by very large to huge margins.

However, in 2005 she did manage to win a grand total of 539 votes in her home town and get herself elected as one of 21 Town Meeting Representatives of Lexington, Massachusetts. Lexington has a population of 31,394. She was reelected to that post in 2008.

In her entire life she has run nothing bigger than her medical practice. With that total lack of experience I can't see why anyone would believe that she is even vaguely qualified to be President of the United States and leader of the free world.

A vote for any third party candidate is a vote for Trump or Cruz. Staying home on election day will have the same affect. We are all united in at least one way: None of us can afford 4 or 8 eight years of a Republican like Trump or Cruz in the White House and 20 years with a majority of ultra conservative justices on the Supreme Court.

Hey You! Howard Dean! Under the bus you go!

From GD-P: http://www.democraticunderground.com/12511481599

Some Bernie fans seem to be losing hope and are announcing they will vote for...

....the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein.

I had never heard of her so I had to do some reading. Jill Stein is as qualified to be President as Ben Carson. Like Carson she is physician.

She has run for several offices - Massachusetts House of Representatives, Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth, Governor of Massachusetts, and President of the United States on Green Party ticket in 2012. She lost each of those races by very large margins.

However, in 2005 she did manage to win 539 votes and get herself elected as one of 21 Town Meeting Representatives in her home town of Lexington, Massachusetts. Lexington has a huge population of 31,394. She was reelected to that post in 2008.

With all of that experience I can see why some believe that she is totally qualified to be President of the United States and leader of the free world.

My final thoughts on the Reagan/AIDS remarks

(I posted this on GD-P after a long and spirited defense of Hillary on that board.)

I certainly understand that some of you were genuinely upset; I get that. I understand your righteous anger. It reminded many of a very painful period of our history that you experienced in a way that many of us can never comprehend. I'm sorry that you had to experience that pain again as a result of this incident and apologize if my recent defense of what I believe was an honest mistake was in any way disrespectful of your feelings.

I sincerely wish that the entire episode had never happened. However, you have a perfect right to be upset whether the remarks were made intentionally or not. On the other hand you should perhaps consider whether it was in Hillary's best interests to make you so angry when trying to determine whether her remarks were indeed intentional.

I have also noticed that a number of people who have been most outspoken about how damaging Hillary's mistake has been have avatars showing they support Bernie Sanders. I don't think that's a coincidence.

However, I also understand that there are those whose support for Bernie and/or their dislike for Hillary helps drive their real anger on the subject. That to some degree is also understandable. It's human nature to be far less forgiving of political opponents than those we support.

On the other hand it also appears that some of Bernie's supporters on DU have gleefully seized upon this incident and attempted to use it as a political weapon against Hillary while of course displaying righteous indignation. In my humble opinion trying to use the tragedy of others for political gain is reprehensible.

I have my suspicions as to which people fall in to which of those last two categories, but only they know for sure their true motivation.

In closing I want to again offer my condolences and my support for those who were most personally affected by this situation.

My final thoughts on the Reagan/AIDS remarks

I certainly understand that some of you were genuinely upset; I get that. I understand your righteous anger. It reminded many of a very painful period of our history that you experienced in a way that many of us can never comprehend. I'm sorry that you had to experience that pain again as a result of this incident and apologize if my recent defense of what I believe was an honest mistake was in any way disrespectful of your feelings.

I sincerely wish that the entire episode had never happened. However, you have a perfect right to be upset whether the remarks were made intentionally or not. On the other hand you should perhaps consider whether it was in Hillary's best interests to make you so angry when trying to determine whether her remarks were indeed intentional.

I have also noticed that a number of people who have been most outspoken about how damaging Hillary's mistake has been have avatars showing they support Bernie Sanders. I don't think that's a coincidence.

However, I also understand that there are those whose support for Bernie and/or their dislike for Hillary helps drive their real anger on the subject. That to some degree is also understandable. It's human nature to be far less forgiving of political opponents than those we support.

On the other hand it also appears that some of Bernie's supporters on DU have gleefully seized upon this incident and attempted to use it as a political weapon against Hillary while of course displaying righteous indignation. In my humble opinion trying to use the tragedy of others for political gain is reprehensible.

I have my suspicions as to which people fall in to which of those last two categories, but only they know for sure their true motivation.

In closing I want to again offer my condolences and my support for those who were most personally affected by this situation.

NOTE: I will not be responding to replies to this post.

Everyone just needs to chill out

Hillary has admitted she made a mistake on the Reagan/Aids remarks. Contrary to some opinions around here, there are no perfect candidates.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/12511471110

Why was the US government concerned about the Sandinistas

(Someone posted the entire video clip of Bernie Sanders being interviewed about his trips to Nicaragua and Cuba from which the segment shown during the debate on GD-P. It was a long clip in which Sanders described how great the Sandanista government was and how the Reagan administration was persecuting it. (you can see the clip on GD-P). The Bernie supporters were all saying how the clip shown during the debate was taken out of contaxt and how wonderful Bernie was. I posted this in response.)

I couldn't remember why the US government was so concerned about the Sandinista government back in the 1980's. I viewed and listened to the entire clip and evidently Bernie Sanders thought that they all about helping the Nicaraguan people. I began reading up on the subject and came across this entry on the Sandinista's in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandinista_National_Liberation_Front

Sure enough much of the entry described some of the programs Sanders described. It appeared that the Sandinista government did have many good programs. But then came across a section about how the Sandinista government aligned itself with the Cuban communist government of Fidel Castro. Now remember this was at the height of the cold war so that gave me some insight into our government's concern. But at the time Reagan was President so figured that our government may well have been overreacting. Remember it was under Reagan that Ollie North ran drugs in South America to covertly fund the Contras who were fighting the Sandinistas, so their judgement perhaps can't be trusted. Then I came across this section in the Wikipedia entry.

Relationship with eastern bloc intelligence agencies

According to Cambridge University historian Christopher Andrew, who undertook the task of processing the Mitrokhin Archive, Carlos Fonseca Amador, one of the original three founding members of the FSLN had been recruited by the KGB in 1959 while on a trip to Moscow. This was one part of Aleksandr Shelepin's 'grand strategy' of using national liberation movements as a spearhead of the Soviet Union's foreign policy in the Third World, and in 1960 the KGB organized funding and training for twelve individuals that Fonseca handpicked. These individuals were to be the core of the new Sandinista organization. In the following several years, the FSLN tried with little success to organize guerrilla warfare against the government of Luis Somoza Debayle. After several failed attempts to attack government strongholds and little initial support from the local population, the National Guard nearly annihilated the Sandinistas in a series of attacks in 1963. Disappointed with the performance of Shelepin's new Latin American "revolutionary vanguard", the KGB reconstituted its core of the Sandinista leadership into the ISKRA group and used them for other activities in Latin America.

According to Andrew, Mitrokhin says during the following three years the KGB handpicked several dozen Sandinistas for intelligence and sabotage operations in the United States. Andrew and Mitrokhin say that in 1966, this KGB-controlled Sandinista sabotage and intelligence group was sent to northern Mexico near the US border to conduct surveillance for possible sabotage.[82]

In July 1961 during the Berlin Crisis of 1961 KGB chief Alexander Shelepin sent a memorandum to Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev containing proposals to create a situation in various areas of the world which would favor dispersion of attention and forces by the US and their satellites, and would tie them down during the settlement of the question of a German peace treaty and West Berlin. It was planned, inter alia, to organize an armed mutiny in Nicaragua in coordination with Cuba and with the "Revolutionary Front Sandino". Shelepin proposed to make appropriations from KGB funds in addition to the previous assistance $10,000 for purchase of arms.

Khrushchev sent the memo with his approval to his deputy Frol Kozlov and on August 1 it was, with minor revisions, passed as a CPSU Central Committee directive. The KGB and the Soviet Ministry of Defense were instructed to work out more specific measures and present them for consideration by the Central Committee.[83]
Cooperation with foreign intelligence agencies during the 1980s

Other researchers have documented the contribution made from other Warsaw Pact intelligence agencies to the fledgling Sandinista government including the East German Stasi, by using recently declassified documents from Berlin[84] as well as from former Stasi spymaster Markus Wolf who described the Stasi's assistance in the creation of a secret police force modeled on East Germany's.[85]

This gave me some insight as to why our intelligence might have believed that the Sandinistas might have been a tool of the Soviet Union as it tried to spread its influence and political control in South America.

Also in another part of the Wikipedia article I learned the Sandinista government wasn't above dealing harshly with their political enemies. In section of the Wikipedia entry called "Civil Rights Violations" I found this:

Time magazine in 1983 published reports of human rights violations in an article which stated that "According to Nicaragua's Permanent Commission on Human Rights, the regime detains several hundred people a month; about half of them are eventually released, but the rest simply disappear." Time also interviewed a former deputy chief of Nicaraguan military counterintelligence, who stated that he had fled Nicaragua after being ordered to kill 800 Miskito prisoners and make it look like they had died in combat.[107] Another article described Sandinista neighbourhood "Defense Committees", modeled on similar Cuban Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, which according to critics were used to unleash mobs on anyone who was labeled a counterrevolutionary. Nicaragua's only opposition newspaper, La Prensa, was subject to strict censorship. The newspaper's editors were forbidden to print anything negative about the Sandinistas either at home or abroad.[107]

There's more on civil rights violations in the piece; you can read it for yourself if you would like. The bottom line is that back at the time of Sanders' visit to Nicaragua, the Sandinista Government wasn't exactly the group of saints which Bernie described in the interview.

Michigan pledged delegate allocation recalculated - Sanders 67, Clinton 64

With Super delegates included: Sanders 67, Clinton 73

http://www.thegreenpapers.com/P16/MI-D

Two things about the debate that ticked me off:

1) Sanders' constant movement with his right hand that he uses to accentuate every word. Every word does not require accentuation. Every time I see him speak it bugs me more. It has become almost intolerable.

2) Who were the group of young women who screeched out every Sanders made a comment. It stuck me has very disingenuous and fake. Not every word out of anyone's is worth screams. The constant reparation bothered me more and more as the debate continued.