......Something had to be done.

So the Clinton administration acted. In 1994 then Senator Joe Biden of Delaware helped to write a 356-page bill called the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, later to be called the Crime Bill. Among the highlights were funding for 100,000 new police officers, $9.7 billion in funding for prisons, and $6.1 billion in funding for prevention programs. There was also a federal assault weapons ban, an expanded federal death penalty, new statutes for immigration law, hate crimes, sex crimes, and gang-related crimes, and even the authority to create a registry for sex offenders. It was the largest crime bill ever written up to that point and it initially seemed as if it would address the nationwide concern over what Americans were seeing as increased violence in their everyday lives. In fact, the Crime Bill even had the support of African-American leaders in Congress, many of whom admitted the bill was imperfect, but knew that something had to be done to protect their communities. In describing his motivation behind signing the bill, President Clinton said, "Gangs and drugs have taken over our streets and undermined our schools...Every day, we read about somebody else who has literally gotten away with murder."

...But what the Black Lives Matter protesters in Philadelphia are too young to realize is the culture surrounding the 1994 Crime Bill was so prevalent, so pervasive, that President Bill Clinton had no choice but to act. Inaction was not never an option, not when the public's health and safety was involved. The only option then was to put forth legislation based on both public sentiment and social science at the time in an effort to stem the violence seen on our city streets. As history has shown us, it is always preferential to have both crime and punishment. But President Bill Clinton ended up facing an impossible situation: If he chose not to act there would be crime all over our city streets. If he chose to act, he and his administration might very well be punished politically for the effects of their decision down the road. And so for the Clinton White House it came down to one huge choice: Crime or punishment.

They chose to address the crime and are still feeling the political punishment twenty-two years later.

Bernie’s top aide Tad Devine, who helped create the superdelegate system, told the Washington Post that “Sanders’s broader aim is the more important one: getting super-delegates as a group, including in states that backed Clinton, to support him.”

He even said Sanders would call for this switch if Sanders trailed in the popular vote and was very close behind in the pledged delegate count, too.
Devine felt very differently in 2008. When asked by NBC’s Brian Williams to comment on the ’08 Democratic primary, he said this:

Now if one candidate goes out and succeeds in the days and weeks ahead and that candidate looks like the candidate who has proven themselves to the voters and the superdelegates go in a different direction, I think there will be a very bad reaction among the voting public.
Watch from 4:05

Independent Senator Bernie Sanders is sitting on millions in campaign funds for his run for the presidency. He also faces the nearly impossible goal of gaining the Democratic nomination. So when his bid comes to its conclusion, what will he do with those millions?

There’s no clear answer but one possibility just might land a Republican in the White House.

Candidates whose campaigns end unsuccessfully are not required to disperse the donations. These funds may sit in their campaign account indefinitely. However, when failed candidates dispose of these funds, they must follow a set of regulations embodied in the 1989 Ethics Reform Act and detailed in Chapter 11 of the Code of Federal Regulations. A simplified version of those regulations is listed below.

REGULATED USE OF EXCESS CAMPAIGN DONATIONS

1. Funds cannot be used for personal use.
2. Funds may be used to pay campaign bills and debts.
3. Funds may be returned to contributors.
4. Funds may be donated to a charity.
5. Funds may be donated to a political party.
6. Funds may be donated to a political candidate.

As of this writing, Bernie Sanders’ principal campaign fund shows $17 million cash-on-hand. That amount will change as more reports come in to the FEC, showing both added donations as well as disbursements. So the cash-on-hand may rise or dip.

Tuesday was a very good night for Bernie Sanders. He beat Hillary Clinton in the Wisconsin primary.

That win should have been a springboard for Sanders heading into the New York primary on April 19. It wasn't.

Here's why.

First, Sanders did an interview with the editorial board of the New York Daily News. In the discussion, a transcript of which was posted on Monday, Sanders came across as the proverbial dog who caught the car. He struggled to explain (or to seemingly understand) the consequences of many of his policies and looked for all the world like someone who, in the words of Clinton, had not done his homework.

Then came Sanders's inexplicable decision to engage with Clinton on the question of who was (and was not) "qualified" to be president. Of course, Sanders was, by his recounting, simply responding to Clinton's previous questioning of his readiness for office -- which she did even if she came up short of saying the exact words.

How many times do we have to hear about polls that tell us Hillary Clinton, Gallup’s most admired woman for 20 years, is unlikable? It’s almost as though the media and pundits want to convince us Hillary is disliked so they can excuse their own spin.

Another day, another poll about how allegedly “unlikable” Hillary Clinton is.

I understand that measuring likability is a traditional part of U.S. politics, and it’s not something that was invented just for Hillary Clinton. But there’s a very particular way in which likability polling seems to be used against Hillary, in a way that it isn’t against other candidates.

Donald Trump, for example, gets poor likability ratings, but they are filtered through a media that have spent an enormous amount of time treating his disgusting campaign of bigotry and braggadocio like a summer parade down Main Street. When Trump’s low favorable ratings are mentioned, it is almost a curiosity. “He’s very unlikable—but he’s still crushing it!”

Hillary’s likability, on the other hand, is rarely discussed within the framework that she’s winning, despite leading the Democratic primary by more than two million votes. Instead, the numbers are regurgitated in a recursive loop of “conventional wisdom” that she isn’t likable.

Clinton herself pledged in January to "get to the bottom" of whether rumors of U.S. contact with extraterrestrial life were true.
In regard to Area 51, Podesta echoed Clinton's call, saying, "What I've talked to the secretary about, and what she's said now in public, is that if she's elected president, when she gets into office, she'll ask for as many records as the United States federal government has to be declassified, and I think that's a commitment that she intends to keep and that I intend to hold her to."

Bernie Sanders’s supporters are fond of the hypothesis that Democratic superdelegates, the elected leaders and party officials who currently support Hillary Clinton by a lopsided-doesn’t-even-begin-to-describe-it 469 to 31, are going to bow to the “will of the people” if Sanders ends up winning more pledged delegates than Clinton by June. There’s just one hiccup in this logic: Sanders fans seem to be conflating the pledged delegate count and the “will of the voters,” when in fact the two are far from interchangeable.

Sanders’s reliance on extremely low-turnout caucus states has meant the pledged delegate count overstates his share of votes. To date, Sanders has captured 46 percent of Democrats’ pledged delegates but just 42 percent of raw votes. So even if Sanders were to draw even in pledged delegates by June — which is extremely unlikely — Clinton could be able to persuade superdelegates to stick with her by pointing to her popular vote lead.

Sanders already has a nearly impossible task ahead of him in trying to erase Clinton’s pledged delegate lead. He’s down by 212 delegates, meaning he’d need to win 56 percent of those remaining to nose in front. He has dominated caucus states such as Idaho and Washington, but only two caucus states — Wyoming and North Dakota — remain on the calendar. What’s more, the biggest states left — New York and California — favor Clinton demographically.

Including caucus results, Clinton leads Sanders by almost 2.4 million raw votes, 9.4 million to just more than 7 million, according to The Green Papers. So then, what would would it take for Sanders to overtake Clinton in the popular vote by the end of the primaries in June?