August 28, 2015

Democratic support for Clinton at lowest since 2012: Reuters poll

Source: Reuters

Fri Aug 28, 2015 3:21pm EDT

Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's support among Democrats has dropped to its lowest point since Reuters/Ipsos began polling on her chances of winning the party's nomination for the 2016 election almost three years ago.

But the former secretary of state still has a lead of more than 20 percentage points over her nearest rival, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the online survey showed on Friday.

Clinton has suffered a steady erosion in the number of people in opinion polls who see her as trustworthy as
controversy has grown over her use of a private email account when she served as America's top diplomat.

The Reuters/Ipsos survey, a rolling poll taken over the previous five days, put Clinton at 45 percent, with Sanders at 25 percent.

Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/08/28/us-usa-election-democrats-idUSKCN0QX2B020150828

August 27, 2015

Republican Senator Discovers Minority Can ‘Filibuster,’ Is Outraged

Source: Daily Intelligencer (New York Magazine)

August 27, 2015 8:46 a.m
by Jonathan Chait

During the first two years of the Obama administration, Democrats enjoyed comfortable control of the House of Representatives, and well over half the Senate. Republican leverage became the filibuster, which the party used as a routine supermajority requirement to block everything. Senator Bob Corker was one of those Republicans. Corker helped craft an agreement to bring a bill to a vote in Congress that would overturn the Obama administration’s Iran nuclear agreement. This bill flipped the old dynamic — now it is Democrats who want to block a bill, and Republicans who want to pass it. And Corker is outraged, outraged, that Democrats would resort to a tactic as low as a filibuster to block his bill:

"...when he saw Reid say that he is trying to build a filibuster, his response was: “Are you kidding me?”

“Is that where they really want to be? Do they really want to vote to block consideration of … probably the biggest foreign policy endeavor?” Corker said in an interview. “Do they want to be in a place where they voted to keep from going to the substance [of the Iran debate]?”

Amazing. The first time, the very first time, Democrats might use a filibuster of their own, you have a Republican managing to talk himself into the view that a filibuster is bad for democracy.

Read more: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/08/republican-outraged-minority-can-filibuster.html

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August 27, 2015

Virginia “hate crime” shootings committed by “pansy” and condoned by “ignorant baboon” Barack Obama

George Zimmerman, the killer of Trayvon Martin who was last seen hawking paintings of the Confederate battle flag that praised the Second Amendment, took to Twitter in the wake of yesterday’s shootings of Alison Parker and Adam Ward to condemn the “Black [piece of shit]” who murdered them and the “Ignorant Baboon” in the White House who mentioned gun control in his comments about their murders.

Presumably because he knows a thing or two about killing people in cold blood, Zimmerman expounded at Twitter-length on the murders of Parker and Ward, writing that:

“Pansy” is, of course, a reference to the fact that the shooter, Vester Flanagan II, was a homosexual, which is relevant here because Zimmerman inexplicably chose to make it so. Flanagan’s motivations, at least as they were communicated in his 23-page-long manifesto, were based on a combination of a personal grudge against Ward and his feelings about the massacre in Charleston, South Carolina earlier this year. But Zimmerman felt it necessary to denigrate his sexuality anyway, as well as complain about what to him was the lack of timely manner in which President Barack Obama addressed the murders:



Putting aside the fact that Zimmerman’s complained, at length, that Obama jumped to conclusions about him and spoke too soon about his killing of Martin, it’s worth noting that Obama did, in fact, address Parker and Ward’s murder yesterday, saying that it “breaks [his] heart every time [he] read[s] or hear[s] about these kinds of incidents,” and that “the number of people who die from gun-related incidents around this country dwarfs any deaths that happen through terrorism.”

(edit)



http://www.salon.com/2015/08/27/george_zimmerman_virginia_hate_crime_shootings_committed_by_pansy_and_condoned_by_ignorant_baboon_barack_obama/

Dear George,
Die SOON, you fucking pig!

August 27, 2015

Hillary Clinton: Private Email Server 'Clearly Wasn't The Best Choice'

Source: HuffPost

Hillary Clinton said Wednesday her decision to use a private email server while serving as secretary of state was not "the best choice."

The Democratic presidential candidate has faced scrutiny since a New York Times report revealed she had used a private email account throughout her time at the State Department. As the FBI investigates the server, which Clinton handed over earlier this month, the former secretary of state has maintained she never sent nor received classified messages with the account.

Clinton addressed the controversy while speaking to reporters in Iowa Wednesday.

"I know people have raised questions about my email use as secretary of state, and I understand why. I get it. " Clinton said. "So here’s what I want the American people to know. My use of personal email was allowed by the State Department. It clearly wasn’t the best choice. I should've used two emails: one personal, one for work, and I take responsibility for that decision. And I want to be as transparent as possible which is why I turned 55,000 pages, why I've turned over my server."

Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-private-email-server-clearly-wasnt-the-best-choice_55de4adae4b0e7117ba8cf56?kvcommref=mostpopular

August 26, 2015

Virginia Shooting Suspect Has Died (Updated with Suicide Note)

Source: HuffPost

The man police believe shot and killed two journalists and wounded a third woman during a live segment Wednesday morning has died from self-inflicted gunshot wounds, authorities confirmed in a press conference.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/virginia-journalists-killed-suspect_55ddba22e4b04ae497051567?nxko6r

Update, 2:25 p.m.: ABC reports that Flanagan sent a 23-page fax identified as a "Suicide Note for Friends and Family" to ABC News at 8:26 a.m. Wednesday morning. The document, ABC says, complains of discrimination that Flanagan has faced as a "gay, black man" and cites the June 17 Charleston church shooting as the "tipping point" that motivated Flanagan to kill Parker and Ward. (Flanagan is believed to have accused Parker of making racist remarks and had accused a past employer of racial discrimination.) The document also reportedly expresses solidarity with the perpetrators of past massacres at Virginia Tech and Columbine High School in Colorado.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/08/26/virginia_tv_on_air_attack_reporter_cameraman_killed.html



Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/virginia-journalists-killed-suspect_55ddba22e4b04ae497051567?nxko6r

August 26, 2015

The New Yorker: Feeling the Bern With the Youth Vote

August 25, 2015
By Nathan Heller



The oddest thing about the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator seeking Democratic nomination for President, is not his distaste for fund-raising, his insistence that he is a “democratic Socialist,” or even his unofficial slogan, “Feel the Bern,” a phrase that vividly recalls Jane Fonda at the moment of her disentanglement from the New Left. It is his popularity with kids. Since tossing his worn cap into the ring, in April, Sanders has racked up a disproportionate share of the youth vote: thirty-seven per cent of voters twenty-nine or younger, compared with Hillary Clinton’s forty per cent, in one poll. Why? Outwardly, he does not seem like a particularly hip or youthful guy. Sanders is nearly seventy-four, dresses like Willy Loman, and can name, from direct memory, the Dodgers’ lineup in the year 1951. When he shows up at events, his fleecy hair, or what remains of it, looks ravaged, as if he had puttered all the way there in a drop-top Model T. He wears a watch; it’s not by Apple. And yet, today, Sanders boasts a larger Facebook following than Clinton and Jeb Bush combined.

It’s on Facebook that Sanders fandom, and a language associated with it, has flourished. Followers post about the way he “slayed” in this or that speech, how he seems “so logical” compared with other politicians, how he motivated them to vote, for the first time, in their late twenties. As Sanders, an independent, throttled into a strong second place for the Democratic nomination, Bern-ers on Twitter praised him as “clever” and “trustworthy.” In the magazine last week, Daniel Wenger reported on an eighteen-year-old kid’s attempt to organize a Sanders YouTube viewing party in his parents’ living room. On Friday, in a greater coup, Sanders received the endorsement of the fifteen-year-old prank candidate Deez Nuts, who made a splash in some Midwestern polls earlier this month, and who cited his frank and accessible style. Queried about Sanders’s leading opponent in the race, Hillary Clinton, Mr. Nuts simply asked, “Why can’t you be more open and friendly like Bernie?”

“Open” is a reasonable description of Sanders’s campaign, which has worked to underscore the candidate’s ideological consistency over the decades. When Sanders started out, in the sixties, he was a civil-rights activist and a sit-in coördinator. After settling in Vermont, he worked in carpentry, wrote weird satirical erotica, and set about the business of losing elections. The goals of the young Sanders were a lot like the goals of Sanders now. From 1981, in his first elected post, as the mayor of Burlington, he fought for corporate regulation and against big-money fund-raising. He sought to lift the minimum wage. Recently, his supporters have produced old footage from his early years, as if to show that, in a field of opportunists, Sanders has held firm to his beliefs. The anachronism of his world view proves both his authenticity and his lack of hidden baggage as a candidate. For young voters, who approach the booth with shallow political memories, this “open” attitude toward Sanders’s past can come as reassurance: they don’t have to worry about being pinioned by a history that they don’t know, because history, for Sanders, is a backward projection of the behavior that they saw last week. The approach is striking in an era when even personal life is preconceived, polished, performed. Sanders is exceptional because he seems, demonstrably, the same guy who he was before the iPhone cameras first appeared.

The nature of that lineage may play a role in Sanders’s youthful popularity, too. He speaks often of “revolution,” as in: “Today, we begin a political revolution to transform our country economically, politically, socially, and environmentally.” Revolution is a term that’s rarely heard now, but it recalls the period when Sanders landed on his political cause. Radicalism nostalgia—the Boomer-propagated idea that the sixties were a halcyon age in American culture—survives today even among people born decades later. For the uninitiated, Sanders is a link back to that heady time. “Neil Young playing at the end of #BernieSanders SC speech is making me hippie fangirl out,” someone far below the hippie age cutoff tweeted this past weekend. Now that American youth culture is increasingly business-oriented—there are shopping recommendations based on your exact location, parties with playlists picked by subscription algorithm, and privatized mobile transportation apps to ferry you between—Sanders’s tinge of hippiedom, his seeming lack of calculation, lets members of the smartphone generation embrace the political sixties trip they never had.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/feeling-the-bern-with-the-youth-vote