He crushed it in Alaska and Washington State, picking up over 80% in Alaska, and over 70% in Washington.
There are no numbers from Hawaii yet, it is not yet 6 pm there, and there has been very little polling, but it appears likely from reports on the ground that Sanders will win there as well.
In an interview with the AP, Elizabeth Warren spoke of Bernie Sanders favorably, and said that he should continue his campaign:
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren waded deeper into the presidential primary debate Thursday, sharpening her criticism of Donald Trump and cheering on Bernie Sanders.
The Massachusetts Democrat described the Republican presidential front-runner as a failed businessman who inherited a fortune from his father and then maintained it ‘‘by cheating people, by defrauding people, and by skipping out on paying his creditors through Chapter 11’’ bankruptcy protection.
………
On Thursday, when asked if Bernie Sanders should drop out of the race, Warren praised the Democratic senator from Vermont.
Sanders has echoed Warren’s criticism of Wall Street and rising student load debt more than any other candidate.
‘‘He’s out there. He fights from the heart. This is who Bernie is,’’ Warren said. ‘‘He has put the right issues on the table both for the Democratic Party and for the country in general so I’m still cheering Bernie on.’’
I don’t know who she favors, but it is clear that, at a minimum, she thinks that it is important for Bernie Sanders to push Hillary Clinton’s positions away from the mindless triangulation of Bill Clinton.
Man, to hell with this story. Even schadenfreude has some limits.
—Charlie Pierce, responding to allegations that Ted Cruz engaged in marital infidelity
I agree. I want no part of any discussion that juxtaposes Ted Cruz and sex.
**shudder**
Sanders was giving a speech in Oregon, and a bird landed on his lectern and listened to his speech:
A bird landed on Bernie Sanders‘ lectern during a campaign rally today and everyone lost their freaking minds.
No, seriously, this actually happened:
Because if a topless protester shows up, Sanders lets her in, and Trump kicks her out:
Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders this week joked about a topless woman who showed up at one of his rallies recently to protest Republican rival Donald Trump.
“Well, I was trying very hard to get every detail,” the Vermont senator joked during an interview with Phoenix-area radio station KTAR when asked if he could read the text on the woman’s chest.
“No, just kidding,” Sanders chuckled as the male radio hosts erupted into laughter.
“No, actually I was trying to focus on a couple of other things,” Sanders continued, trying to stifle another laugh as he pivoted to discuss campaign issues of income inequality.
A woman who tried unsuccessfully to get into one of Trump’s rallies in Arizona over the weekend opted to show up at Sanders’s rally in Phoenix on Saturday instead.
The words “stop fascism” were revealed on her back and “hate speech is not free speech” were marked on her chest, as she stood on someone’s back, interrupting Sanders’s rally.
She was also wearing “Free the Nipple” pasties.
Photos (she is quite fetching) available at the links.
There are two Democrats whose resignation from office right now would do their party and country a service.
Their disappearance might also help Hillary Clinton convince skeptical Democrats that her nomination, if it happens, is about the future, and not about resurrecting and ratifying the worst aspects of the first Clinton reign when she and her husband rarely met a donor to whom they wouldn’t try to auction a sleepover in the Lincoln Bedroom.
In fact, while we’re at it, and if Secretary Clinton really wants us to believe she’s no creature of the corporate and Wall Street money machine — despite more than $44 million in contributions from the financial industry since 2000 and her $675,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, not to mention several million more paid by other business interests for an hour or two of her time — she should pick up the gauntlet herself and publicly call for the departure of these two, although they are among her nearest and dearest. And we don’t mean Bill and Chelsea.
No, she should come right out and ask for the resignations of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Democratic National Committee Chair — and Florida congresswoman — Debbie Wasserman Schultz. In one masterstroke, she could separate herself from two of the most prominent of all corporate Democratic elitists.
Each is a Clinton disciple and devotee, each has profited mightily from the association and each represents all that is wrong with a Democratic Party that in the pursuit of money from rich donors and powerful corporations has abandoned those it once so proudly represented — working men and women.
………
This is why Emanuel and Wasserman Schultz must go. To millions, they are enablers of the one percent, perpetuators of the Washington mentality that the rest of the country has grown to hate. What a message such servants of plutocracy send: Democrats — a bridge to the past.
Hillary is not going to do this, but it would be a savvy political move.
Also, putting Emanuel and Wasserman-Schultz in the political cross-hairs would be good for the party and their constituents.
………
See what happened there? Slick, wasn’t it? My man Chuck Todd asked Schmidt why the anti-Trump Republicans weren’t banding together to support the clear runner-up and Schmidt started babbling about small-d democratic processes wah-dee-doo-dah. The direct answer to the question…
So, why isn’t the cavalry rallying around Cruz?
“Because Tailgunner Ted Cruz is a messianic and friendless theocrat whose policies are a mix of the Book of Revelation and The Fountainhead, and anyone who looks at him thinks of the skeevy uncle whom they tell their kids to avoid at Thanksgiving, and anyone who listens to him who isn’t already lost in Jesus wouldn’t trust him to park their car.”
Mr. Pierce owes me a screen wipe.
Editor’s Note: In our report Tuesday night on a North Carolina family that’s supporting Donald Trump, we were continuing a long NewsHour tradition of talking directly to voters.
We want to hear from them, in their own voices, speaking about what motivates their political preferences.
Regrettably, none of us at the NewsHour recognized the questions that could arise from Grace Tilly’s tattoos, and we didn’t raise them with her until after the report aired. At that point, our producer contacted Ms. Tilly and she insisted the tattoos are religious in nature and have nothing to do with a neo-Nazi theme or white supremacy.
We referenced her comments in an editor’s note, posted on our website.
Many of our online commenters have since let us know they reject that explanation. We’re now posting this note as a follow up.
We at the NewsHour remain committed to being as transparent as possible in covering this election.
She had a code for Heil Hitler (88) tattooed on the back of her hand.
You got taken in by a Neo Nazi, and you need to acknowledge this.
Remember this screw up, and more importantly their unwillingness to man up, at pledge time, folks.
It’s Over Gandalf. We Need to Unite Behind Saruman to Save Middle Earth from Sauron!
It appears to be gaining meme status on the internet.
On the other hand, “H H”, as in, “Heil Hitler”
And you can get it on T-Shirts and Pillows
The PBS news hour did a warm fuzzy about how politically engaged some Trump supporters in North Caroline were deeply involving themselves in the political process.
Somehow, they missed the fact that this family was festooned with white supremacist tattoos:
Last night, PBS NewsHour ran a story on the Tilly family of Fayetteville, North Carolina. The Tillys do not have a history of being active in politics, but various members of the family—both old and young—are being motivated to vote or work for a campaign for the first time by Donald Trump.
If you can put aside the fact that the Tillys are rallying behind Trump, this is a small but almost heartwarming story of a family choosing to engage with democracy. That’s also if you can put aside the fact that Grace, one of the central characters in the story, has large white power tattoos on each of her hands.
Someone at the News Hour has got a lot of explaining to do.
This sort of stuff is American Nazi 101, and I have no clue how everyone involved in this news report missed it.
D
onald Trump is now strongly implying that any attempt to stop his nomination by the Republican establishment at the convention will be met by rioters:
………
But let’s say a miracle happens and one of the many Republican candidates who is fantasizing about rushing in to save the party manages to unify the party. What then?
Would Trump — who by then will have little-to-zero hope of launching a third-party run — just sit back an absorb a massive humiliation?
Well, you won’t like Trump supporters when they are angry and legally indemnified against violence.
This threat isn’t just some fantasy I’ve conjured. Trump has all but said he and his “people” would resist being usurped with everything he’s got:“I don’t know that that’s going to happen. But I’ll tell you, there are going to be a lot of people that will be very upset if that doesn’t happen. I think that would be pretty unfair.”
With his daily war against protesters as training and his followers seeing him as their savior, maybe the Republican establishment will decide they’re better off just letting Trump take the nomination. Sure it could be the end of the GOP and the dawn of American fascism. But at least he’ll try to cut their taxes by $1.3 million a year.
I am so glad that the Donald is their problem, and not ours.
Not a good night for Bernie.
Right now, it looks like he might have win either Missouri or Illinois by a narrow margin, but Clinton will likely pick up something near twice as many delegates.
On the Republican side, Marco “The Lightweight” Rubio, lost Florida, and he is now out, and Trump appears to be about half way to the nomination, with lots of winner take all primaries on the Republican side coming up.
I understand that one needs to have a sense of decorum at a funeral.
It is not a place where one should prosecute political differences.
That being said, when you are in a primary contest, and among the complaints against you is that you are:
This picture from Nancy Reagan’s funeral is a disaster, showing her palling around with Shrub, is a complete clusterf%$#, as the ensuing Twitter sh%$ storm shows:
This may be the best photo from Mrs. Reagan’s funeral. pic.twitter.com/kX1WZP9mwi— David Chalian (@DavidChalian) March 14, 2016
The fail is strong in this one.
H/t naked capitalism.
Not a surprise.
The mayor of Chicago is less popular than a case of the clap:
Bernie Sanders has tried to make the presidential primary vote in and around Chicago into a referendum on Mayor Rahm Emanuel, but Hillary Clinton won’t be giving him more ammunition when she visits the city on Monday.
The Democratic presidential candidate and the former Clinton and Obama White House aide aren’t expected to see each other while she’s in town, Emanuel’s office said Sunday. Clinton often meets with, or is introduced by, mayors or other elected officials who have endorsed her as she campaigns across the country.
Adam Collins, a spokesman for Emanuel, said the mayor’s “focus remains on the job voters hired him to do last year, create opportunities for people across the city and tackle the challenges Chicago faces.” While Emanuel and Clinton won’t be meeting because “their respective schedules [won’t] make it possible,” Collins said, “the mayor’s support for President Clinton and Secretary Clinton is well known.”………
Emanuel, who served as a senior adviser in Bill Clinton’s White House, has been under pressure as his police department faces a federal investigation into the alleged cover-up of a video of the shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. His approval rating was at a record low of 27 percent in a poll conducted for the Chicago Tribune in January, and four in 10 Chicagoans want Emanuel to resign. Half of the black and Latino voters surveyed said they want Emanuel to step down.
Aware of Emanuel’s vulnerabilities, Sanders has hammered the mayor in the run-up to Tuesday’s Illinois presidential primary, hoping to make him a Clinton liability.
“Hillary Clinton proudly lists Mayor Rahm Emanuel as one of her leading mayoral endorsers,” he said at a Saturday press conference. “Well, let me be as clear as I can be: based on his disastrous record as mayor of the city of Chicago, I do not want Mayor Emanuel’s endorsement if I win the Democratic nomination.”
It sucks to be Rahm right now.
One of the claims made by the Clinton campaign is that she has experience, and knows how to get things done.
I’m not quite sure how this makes sense.
She has no experience in an executive elected position, and Bernie Sanders was mayor of Burlington for 8 years.
She was in Congress for 8 years, Bernie for 25 years.
What’s more, all through his legislative career, he has managed to make significant legislative accomplishments despite his status as a party outsider:
As Democrats cobbled together a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s immigration law three years ago, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York was clear about one thing: His party could not suffer a single defection.
But one naysayer remained — Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who had opposed a similar effort in 2007 and once again did not like provisions in the new bill that he thought would displace American workers. And he had a price, a $1.5 billion youth jobs program.
Through wheeling and dealing, shaming and cajoling, Mr. Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, got his wish, and his favored provision was grafted incongruously onto a tough-minded Republican border security amendment and paid for by higher visa fees for some foreign travelers.
………
Yet in spite of persistent carping that Mr. Sanders is nothing but a quixotic crusader — during their first debate, Hillary Clinton cracked, “I’m a progressive, but I’m a progressive who likes to get things done” — he has often been an effective, albeit modest, legislator. He has enacted his agenda piece by piece, in politically digestible chunks with few sweeping legislative achievements in a quarter-century in Congress.
Over one 12-year stretch in the House, Mr. Sanders passed more amendments by roll call vote than any other member of Congress. In the Senate, he secured money for dairy farmers and community health centers, blocked banks from hiring foreign workers and reined in the Federal Reserve, all through measures attached to larger bills.
………
His congressional relationships with Democrats and Republicans have been largely legislative and not loving. A backscratcher he is not. Mr. Sanders is far more likely to be found alone in his apartment watching cable news than out for Chinese food with other members of Congress.
“He is not Ted Kennedy, who managed to have these personal relationships that come from the day in and day out working the halls,” said Representative Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont, who replaced Mr. Sanders in the House. “The way he works is consistent with his temperament and his skills.”
Counter to his reputation as a far-left gadfly, Mr. Sanders has done much of his work with Republican partners, generally people with whom he has little, but sometimes just enough, in common.
And Hillary Clinton’s accomplishments?
Voting for the Iraq invasion, destroying Libya, installing a failed puppet regime in the Ukraine, and supporting every other ill conceived American imperial adventure over the past 15 years.
What experience is there to see?
Nepotism is not experience, see Bush, George Walker and Bush, Jeb.
In an article outlining he rather fraught relationship between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, Politico drops this fascinating anecdote:
It’s an illustration of the extent to which the two political outsiders, once allies, have parted ways. Nader has known Sanders for decades and the Vermont socialist once referred to him as “a good friend” during a committee hearing, but he said Sanders hasn’t returned his phone calls for the past 15 years. During his time in Washington, as Sanders has fostered congenial relations with Clinton, said Nader, “He’s totally cut people like me out.”
Gee, what did Ralph Nader do about 15 years ago?
What has he never offered the most perfunctory expression of regret for?
It appears that Sanders hasn’t forgiven Ralph Nader for his exercise in narcissistic nihilism that was his 2000 campaign, which was calculated to provide maximize the benefit to George W. Bush, because, as Alfred Pennyworth says, “Some men just want to see the world burn.”
Good on Sanders for recognizing what Nader has become.
For all of his bombast, Thomas Franks notes that Donald Trump has a serious and real position on trade that is unique amongst his Republican compatriots, specifically he is the only one who talks against the current regime of free trade fetishism that is the Washington Consensus.
Over the past 50 years, there has been a trajectory towards greater trade liberalization, along with a massive expansion in property rights and rents.
Ordinary Americans note that this has made their lives, and the lives of their children, measurably worse.
The Very Serious People (VSPs) among our elites argue that in the long run we will benefit, but it’s been over 2 generations with poor results, and as John Maynard Keynes said, “In the long run, we are all dead.”
The VSPs maintain that it is all racism. It’s something more significant than that:
………
Or so we’re told. Last week, I decided to watch several hours of Trump speeches for myself. I saw the man ramble and boast and threaten and even seem to gloat when protesters were ejected from the arenas in which he spoke. I was disgusted by these things, as I have been disgusted by Trump for 20 years. But I also noticed something surprising. In each of the speeches I watched, Trump spent a good part of his time talking about an entirely legitimate issue, one that could even be called leftwing.
Yes, Donald Trump talked about trade. In fact, to judge by how much time he spent talking about it, trade may be his single biggest concern – not white supremacy. Not even his plan to build a wall along the Mexican border, the issue that first won him political fame. He did it again during the debate on 3 March: asked about his political excommunication by Mitt Romney, he chose to pivot and talk about … trade.
It seems to obsess him: the destructive free-trade deals our leaders have made, the many companies that have moved their production facilities to other lands, the phone calls he will make to those companies’ CEOs in order to threaten them with steep tariffs unless they move back to the US.
Trump embellished this vision with another favorite leftwing idea: under his leadership, the government would “start competitive bidding in the drug industry”. (“We don’t competitively bid!” he marveled – another true fact, a legendary boondoggle brought to you by the George W Bush administration.) Trump extended the critique to the military-industrial complex, describing how the government is forced to buy lousy but expensive airplanes thanks to the power of industry lobbyists.
Or so we’re told. Last week, I decided to watch several hours of Trump speeches for myself. I saw the man ramble and boast and threaten and even seem to gloat when protesters were ejected from the arenas in which he spoke. I was disgusted by these things, as I have been disgusted by Trump for 20 years. But I also noticed something surprising. In each of the speeches I watched, Trump spent a good part of his time talking about an entirely legitimate issue, one that could even be called leftwing.
Yes, Donald Trump talked about trade. In fact, to judge by how much time he spent talking about it, trade may be his single biggest concern – not white supremacy. Not even his plan to build a wall along the Mexican border, the issue that first won him political fame. He did it again during the debate on 3 March: asked about his political excommunication by Mitt Romney, he chose to pivot and talk about … trade.
It seems to obsess him: the destructive free-trade deals our leaders have made, the many companies that have moved their production facilities to other lands, the phone calls he will make to those companies’ CEOs in order to threaten them with steep tariffs unless they move back to the US.
Trump embellished this vision with another favorite leftwing idea: under his leadership, the government would “start competitive bidding in the drug industry”. (“We don’t competitively bid!” he marveled – another true fact, a legendary boondoggle brought to you by the George W Bush administration.) Trump extended the critique to the military-industrial complex, describing how the government is forced to buy lousy but expensive airplanes thanks to the power of industry lobbyists.
The most frightening thing about Donald Trump is that he is the best Republican on the issues, not his demagoguery.
Ben Carson has endorsed Donald Trump for Presisent, and capped it off by suggesting that it’s all an act:
Ben Carson, the former pediatric neurosurgeon who dropped out of the Republican presidential race last week, endorsed Donald Trump on Friday, praising his “guts” and “energy.”
“There are two different Donald Trumps,” Carson said at the billionaire’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. “There’s the one you see on the stage and there’s the one who is very cerebral, sits there and considers things very carefully. You can have a very good conversation with him. That’s the Donald Trump that you’re going to start seeing more and more of.”
Trump agreed with that assessment.
“I probably do agree. There’s the public version … it seems to have worked over my lifetime,” he said. “I think it’s different than the personal one.”
Moments later, though, Trump seemed to reject that idea.
“I don’t think there are two Donald Trumps. I think there’s one Donald Trump,” he said.
This is aa whole world of mental dysfunction, as would be anticipated by putting Donald Trump and Ben Carson together.
The frightening thing is that one of them is the odds on favorite for the Republican nomination.
It’s the 3rd endorsement in the magazine’s 100+ year history.
The Nation‘s prior endorsements are Jesse Jackson in 1988, and Barack Obama in 2008, so they are batting .500.
In the week leading up to the Michigan primary, Clinton was leading by in excess 20 points in the last few day’s polling.
Well, when polling places started running out of ballots for the Democratic primary, it was a sign that the polls might not be accurate.
As I am writing this, the Detroit Free Press has called Michigan for Bernie Sanders.
It appears that the Sanders got its get out the vote effort right tonight.