Sanders has been declared the decisive winner of the Nevada caucus, getting nearly half of the caucus votes, and scoring more than double of his nearest competitor, Joe Biden.
Needless to say, someone at MSNBC will call this a potential disaster.
(Performs quick Google)
Yep, Tweety delivers.
Chris Matthews compares the Sanders victory to the Nazi invasion of France.
What the f%$# is wrong with these people?
Just got back from picking up Nat from rehearsal, and I was listening to NPR talk about the elections results.
They really, really HATE Bernie Sanders with a white hot passion.
The rhetorical back-flips that are being invoked by the NPR reporting team to avoid calling New Hampshire a Sanders win are a complete mind-f%$#.
Remember this at pledge time.
We have the results now, with Bernie Sanders finishing first, with Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar close behind.
They all should qualify for deleg for some delegates.
Neither Elizabeth Warren (4th) and Biden (5th) qualified for any delegates.
I think that both Warren and Biden are done.
Warren had much the same sort of advantages that Sanders did in New Hampshire, and finished very poorly, and Biden’s excitability argument has been left with more holes than Donald Trump’s cerebral cortex.
This leaves Bernie and 3 potential challengers, Klobuchar Buttigieg, and Bloomberg, who has not participated in the early primaries, because he is trying to buy the nomination.
I’m not sure if Klobuchar will have staying power, she was boosted by the New York Times half endorsement and the full endorsement of the Manchester Union-Leader, but the contests are moving to states that are less lily white, and both Buttigieg and Bloomberg have pretty egregious records of hostility to minorities.
South Carolina should be interesting.
Nevada is is dropping the vote tabulation system that failed so ignominiously in Iowa.
All things considered, I’d go after Shadow, Inc. for a refund:
The Nevada Democratic Party said Tuesday that it will not use the app at the center of the technical difficulties causing delayed results in Iowa’s caucuses.
“NV Dems can confidently say that what happened in the Iowa caucus last night will not happen in Nevada on February 22nd,” the state party’s chairman, William McCurdy II, said in a statement. “We will not be employing the same app or vendor used in the Iowa caucus.”The app was developed by Shadow, a software company in Denver. Representatives for the firm didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Whoever at the DNC decided to push these guys on various state parties should be fired ……… Out of a cannon ……… and into the sun.
The vote count has not budged from 1.9% reporting for something like 2 hours.
In 2016, they were at over 90% reporting at this time, but since it appears that they employed the geniuses from the Clinton campaign who f%$#ed up their political models completely, the app is not working well, so the state party is holding results back for, “quality control”.
In reality, they aren’t holding back results for, “quality control.”
In the best case they are holding back for, “Employing blithering idiots to handle critical infrastructure,” and in the worst case, they are holding back results for, “Electoral fraud.”
I guess that we will find out in the morning.
Standings with 1.9% reporting, which means that it’s still a crap shoot are:
No analysis, because the numbers are to preliminary, and too dodgy, reports are that state party officials are verifying by hand, to make any analysis beyond this xkcd cartoon:
The DNC has allowed Michael Bloomberg to buy his way into the next series of debates.
This is an artifact of Bloomberg’s large donations to state parties as well as the large amount of money that he is dropping on political ads, which generates a similarly large amount of commissions for political consultants.
It sucks, but maybe Bloomberg will be destroyed in the debates for his history of racist policies and hostile work environments:
The Democratic National Committee is drastically revising its criteria to participate in primary debates after New Hampshire, doubling the polling threshold and eliminating the individual donor requirement, which could pave the way for former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg to make the stage beginning in mid-February.
Candidates will need to earn at least 10 percent in four polls released from Jan. 15 to Feb. 18, or 12 percent in two polls conducted in Nevada or South Carolina, in order to participate in the Feb. 19 debate in Las Vegas. Any candidate who earns at least one delegate to the national convention in either the Iowa caucuses or New Hampshire primary will also qualify for the Nevada debate.………
Not everyone is thrilled that Bloomberg — who has hit 10 percent in only one of the requisite four polls released so far — could be on stage after the donor threshold was eliminated.
“To now change the rules in the middle of the game to accommodate Mike Bloomberg, who is trying to buy his way into the Democratic nomination, is wrong,” Jeff Weaver, a senior adviser to Sanders, told POLITICO as the rules were being announced.
I agree with Mr. Weaver.
If Joe Manchin flips, his career needs to be ended:
President Trump and White House officials are looking for at least one Senate Democrat to vote against removing the president from office at the end of his impeachment trial, and they see Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) as the most likely candidate.
Trump took particular pride that three House Democrats voted against his impeachment, White House officials said, and he would like to be able to get at least one Senate Democrat to vote for his acquittal so he can claim the decision was bipartisan.
Manchin has sided with Trump on tough votes before, such as the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. But voting to acquit the president would be an even more politically charged decision, one that could help him maintain his reputation as a moderate back home but would probably make him a pariah within his own party.
For his Kavanaugh vote, he should ALREADY be a pariah.
For his string pulling for his pharma executive looter daughter, he should ALREADY be a pariah.
Still, if he flips on this, he needs to be gone. Period, full stop.
I give quite a bit to fellow Dems – we’ve fundraised over $300,000 for others (more than my “dues”), w/ over 50% going to swing seats.DCCC made clear that they will blacklist any org that helps progressive candidates like me. I can choose not to fund that kind of exclusion. https://t.co/qqwdwPAqek
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 10, 2020
The powers that be in the Washington, DC Democratic Party have bleating piteously over Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) refusing to raise money for the DCCC, because the DCCC has decided to go on a Jihad against progressive Democrats.
Of course the DCCC has always been an enemy of the progressive wing of the party, but Nancy Pelosi put the hapless Cheri Bustos in charge of the organization this time around, who made it official, so AOC’s action is reasonable, particularly when juxtaposed with her prodigious fundraising for Democrats in swing districts:
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) announced she had formed a political action committee on Saturday to help raise funds for progressive primary candidates.
The congresswoman has been a vocal opponent of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s policy to “blacklist” vendors and firms that work with candidates mounting primary challenges against Democratic incumbents. Ocasio-Cortez was one such candidate, having run a successful primary campaign against Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.) in 2018.
Democratic leadership sees the rule as necessary to protect seats and win elections, but critics like Ocasio-Cortez and fellow 2018 upset victor Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) say it prevents fresh voices from reaching Congress and could encumber efforts to increase diversity in the halls of the Capitol.
Ocasio-Cortez has also not paid her dues to the DCCC during this campaign cycle and said she did not plan to pay. The funds are traditionally provided to the DCCC by House members to redistribute among other important races.
Fox News reported that nearly 100 members had yet to pay their dues as of October.
Considering the fact that the DCCC is blacklisting people and organizations for people who are supporting challengers to right wing sellouts like Henry Cuellar and Dan Lipinski, who are in reliably Democratic districts, her actions are not only justified, but obligory.
More than a year after his death, a cache of computer files saved on the hard drives of Thomas Hofeller, a prominent Republican redistricting strategist, is becoming public.
Republican state lawmakers in North Carolina fought in court to keep copies of these maps, spreadsheets and other documents from entering the public record. But some files have already come to light in recent months through court filings and news reports.
They have been cited as evidence of gerrymandering that got political maps thrown out in North Carolina, and they have raised questions about Hofeller’s role in the Trump administration’s failed push for a census citizenship question.
Now more of the files are available online through a website called The Hofeller Files, where Hofeller’s daughter, Stephanie Hofeller, published a link to her copy of the files on Sunday after first announcing her plans in a tweet last month.
“These are matters that concern the people and their franchise and their access to resources. This is, therefore, the property of the people,” Hofeller told NPR. “I won’t be satisfied that we the people have found everything until we the people have had a look at it in its entirety.”
………
Stephanie then reconnected with her mother, Kathleen, and visited her parents’ apartment in North Carolina, where she found four external hard drives and a clear plastic bag containing 18 USB thumb drives in her father’s room. Stephanie says her mother encouraged her to take the devices.
………
It turned out they were filled with photos of Stephanie with her children and other personal items — as well as files from her father’s work as a redistricting consultant for Republicans.
While looking for an attorney to represent her mother in 2018, Stephanie says she connected with the North Carolina chapter of Common Cause, an advocacy group that had brought a lawsuit against Republican state officials to overturn political maps Thomas Hofeller helped draw. After mentioning the hard drives to Common Cause, Stephanie received a court order to turn them over as potential evidence for the lawsuit. She did so in March after making a copy of some of the files for herself.
Since then, the Hofeller files have led to bombshell developments in two major legal battles in the political world.
In September, Common Cause won its legal challenge to political maps in North Carolina, where a state court cited some of the files as evidence of gerrymandering designed to unfairly give Republicans an advantage in winning elections and maintaining control of the state legislature.
………
For her part, Stephanie says she’s committed to transparency with the public in case she gets access to any more of her father’s files.
“If I were to find something,” she says, “I would most certainly share it.”
There is a whole lot of slime found underneath those rocks.
There will be a number of theories about what happened with the UK Parliamentary elections, but the thesis of Dr. Lee Jones, that, “Corbyn failed to see that Brexit wasn’t a distraction from anti-neoliberal revolt but the form it has taken in Britain,” is an idea that deserves to a thoughtful and deliberate examination.
It is posted on the website of an aggressively pro-Brexit organization, but it differs from most of these groups by coming from the left-wing, and anti-Neoliberal perspective:
………
This exposes Corbyn’s principal failure: he could not see that Brexit was not a distraction from a revolt against neoliberalism but the form that this revolt has taken in the British context.
From the beginning, most of the British left have only been able to understand the Leave vote as a reactionary, right-wing phenomenon, and its supporters as either wicked supporters of, or dupes of, the right or even far right. For left liberals to make this error is one thing, but for a lifelong left Eurosceptic to do so is inexcusable.
Brexit was not “sold as a blow to the system”; it was a blow to the system – evidenced by the hysterical response of that system to the vote, its desperate attempts to prevent the enactment of the referendum result ever since, and the challenges to every aspect of Britain’s political and constitutional order. Every political party, barring UKIP and fringe communist groups, campaigned to Remain, as did all the institutions of the business, cultural and educational establishment, backed by the International Monetary Fund and the US president. People rejected the European Union and opted to “take back control” because they could see that the political elite had retreated from them into the state and the interstate networks of the EU. They wanted an end to this post-political era, in which nothing ever changed and political parties had converged on the neoliberal “centre-ground”. They wanted politicians to start representing them again, to listen to and act upon their grievances. They wanted popular sovereignty (see Analysis #6 – Why Did Britain Vote to Leave the EU?).
Read the rest.
I’m still trying to digest this, but it deserves a read.
The Tories have won big in today’s election, having picked up about 60 seats and an absolute majority.
The SNP won big as well, gaining 12 seats, and how holding almost all the constituencies in Scotland
Labour lost about 40 seats, and the Lib-Dems lost about half of their seats (down to 8), including that of their party leader.
The singular issue for this election was Brexit, Labour tried to thread the needle on Brexit, calling for a second referendum, which was clearly a losing proposition, and the Liberal-Democrats were explicitly campaigning on not leaving the EU.
Both of these were clearly unwise politically.
Corbyn did not immediately resign, but he did announce that he would not be party leader for the next election, which provides a chance for a more orderly transition over the next few weeks.
The next few years in the OK are going to be a complete sh%$ show with the that blonde weasel Boris Johnson as PM:
Jeremy Corbyn has said he will remain in place as Labour leader while his party undertakes a “period of reflection” after suffering catastrophic election losses in its traditional heartlands.
Speaking at his own count in Islington North, Corbyn insisted Labour’s policies had proven popular with the electorate, and attacked the media’s portrayal of him and his party.
“I will not lead the party in any future general election campaign. I will discuss with our party to ensure there is a process now of reflection on this result and on the policies that the party will take going forward. And I will lead the party during that period to ensure that discussion takes place and we move on into the future,” he said.
I do hope that the party does not rush pell-mell back to Blairism, because BoJo will almost certainly try to destroy what remains of the modern British welfare state, including, despite his protestation, the National Health Service. (NHS)
Boris Johnson retreated into a fridge as he sought to avoid a TV interview, amid rattled nerves at CCHQ over a narrowing in the opinion polls.
The prime minister was ambushed by the Good Morning Britain producer, Jonathan Swain, during a pre-dawn visit to Modern Milkman, a business in the Tory-held constituency of Pudsey, in Yorkshire.
When Swain first approached Johnson, he asked: “Morning prime minister, would you come on Good Morning Britain, prime minister?” Johnson’s aide can be heard mouthing “oh for f%$#’s sake” in response.
The show’s hosts, Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid, appeared shocked by the aide’s reaction. Swain goes on to say: “I’ve just had a reaction from one of the minders. OK, no need to push, thank you very much,” with Reid exclaiming: “The look on his face, that minder.” The aide was then named on air as the PM’s press secretary, Rob Oxley.
When Swain presses the prime minister, stating he was live on the show, Johnson replied “I’ll be with you in a second” and walked off, before Piers exclaims “he’s gone into the fridge”. Johnson walks inside a fridge stacked with milk bottles with his aides. One person can be heard saying: “It’s a bunker.”
Conservative sources subsequently insisted that Johnson was “categorically not hiding” in the fridge, from which Johnson emerged carrying a crate of milk bottles – but instead his aides were taking a moment to prep the PM for a separate, pre-agreed interview.
………
Tory aides have closely controlled the PM’s appearances since a chaotic day on Monday. Johnson pocketed a journalist’s phone during a TV interview rather than look at a picture of a four-year-old boy asleep on the floor at a Leeds hospital.
I’m not a big fan of Winston Churchill, but I think that I can conclusively state that BoJo is the least Churchillian person in the whole of the UK, and I am including Gary Glitter in that set.
So there I am, looking at the headlines, and I come across Boris Johnson Replaced by Ice Sculpture after Dodging Election Debate on Climate Crisis.
It’s not a parody:
Boris Johnson was criticized by party leaders and represented by a dripping ice sculpture after refusing to appear in a televised election debate focusing on climate change, sparking a row between the UK broadcaster and the Prime Minister’s Conservative Party.
The Conservatives complained to the UK’s broadcasting watchdog Ofcom ahead of the Channel 4 event, which saw Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, Liberal Democrat Jo Swinson and the heads of the UK’s other main parties quizzed on their plans to tackle the climate crisis ahead of next month’s poll.
The party said its offer of having minister Michael Gove stand in for Johnson was rejected by Channel 4, complaining the decision “effectively seeks to deprive the Conservative Party of any representation and attendance at the Channel 4 News debate.”
The network said the event was only for party leaders, and opposition leaders have lambasted Johnson for dodging scrutiny by refusing to appear.
………
Before the debate started, the program’s editor had earlier said Johnson “sent his two wing men” — Gove and Johnson’s father, Stanley — to attempt to “argue their way into” a program intended only for leaders. Stanley Johnson was there to conduct interviews in the so-called spin room after the debate, he later clarified.
Johnson and fellow no-show Nigel Farage, the leader of the Brexit Party, were ultimately replaced at the debate with ice sculptures bearing their parties’ logos, which Channel 4 said was intended to “represent the emergency on planet earth.”
Johnson’s refusal to appear in the debate gave further fuel to charges that he is avoiding media appearances during the campaign. Several opposition figures have also criticized him for refusing to confirm he would take part in an interview with BBC presenter Andrew Neil, which all of the other major leaders have done.
They should have put a blond wig on top of the ice sculpture.
Honestly, if I were to replace BoJo with anything, it would be a Goatse* sculpture.
*If you do not know what Goatse is, Do Not Google It ……… EVER.
There is so clueless and desperate that you feel compelled to consult with Mark Penn, the man who (mis)managed Hillary Clinton’s 2008 Presidential campaign. (He did not know that the Democrats do not have winner take all primaries)
Penn is now advising Donald Trump on impeachment:
As President Trump’s White House battles impeachment, he turned to a familiar face last week: Mark Penn, one of President Bill Clinton’s top strategists.
Penn visited the Oval Office for more than an hour last Monday, three people familiar with the meeting said, and provided polling data and impeachment advice for the president. Penn reassured Trump that he would not be removed from office, according to people familiar with the meeting, and encouraged him to travel the country as Clinton did when he was fighting impeachment over 20 years ago, officials said.………
In a brief interview, Penn said repeatedly that he was not working for Trump. “It’s the second time I have ever met with the president. I’m not counseling him. I’m not advising him.” Penn said he discussed with Trump only publicly available data but declined to be specific on his advice. “I don’t get into presidential meetings.”
That is a distinction without a difference.
Penn is a hack and an incompetent, so while I am angry about his disloyalty to the Democratic Party, it’s better that this mook* is advising Trump as opposed to someone who has a modicum of competence.
*Not to be confused with 2016 Clinton campaign chair Robby Mook, who is also, ironically, a mook.
Pro-democracy candidates buoyed by months of street protests in Hong Kong won a stunning victory in local elections on Sunday, as record numbers voted in a vivid expression of the city’s aspirations and its anger with the Chinese government.
It was a pointed rebuke of Beijing and its allies in Hong Kong, and the turnout — seven in 10 eligible voters — suggested that the public continues to back the democracy movement, even as the protests grow increasingly violent. Young Hong Kongers, a major force behind the demonstrations of the past six months, played a leading role in the voting surge.
With three million voters casting ballots, pro-democracy candidates captured 389 of 452 elected seats, up from only 124 and far more than they have ever won. With one race undecided, the government’s allies held just 57 seats, a remarkable collapse from 300.
………
The elections were for district councils, one of the lowest elected offices in Hong Kong, and they are typically a subdued affair focused on community issues. The job mostly entails pushing for neighborhood needs like bus stops and traffic lights.
But this election took on outsize significance, and was viewed as a referendum on the unrest that has created the city’s worst political crisis in decades. In a semiautonomous part of China where greater democracy is one of the protesters’ biggest demands, it gave residents a rare chance to vote.
The gains at the ballot box are likely to embolden a democracy movement that has struggled with how to balance peaceful and violent protests to achieve its goals.
Unfortunately, I think that Beijing will take exactly the wrong lesson from this, and pressure local authorities to crack down further.
In the long run, I tend to think that Hong Kong’s special status is doomed within the PRC.
For 2 days in a row, the Labour Party in the UK has been hit with DDoS attacks, and while no data has thought to have been lost, it HAS interfered with access to their site and their electoral tools:
The Labour party has faced a second cyber-attack, a day after experiencing what it called a “sophisticated and large-scale” attempt to disrupt its digital systems.
It is understood the party was the subject of a second distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on Tuesday afternoon. Such attacks use “botnets” – networks of compromised computers – to flood a server with requests that overwhelm it.
………
Labour has not said who it suspects is behind the attacks, but said it was confident its security systems ensured there was no data breach.
………
Labour has not said which digital platforms were targeted, but it is understood some of them were election and campaigning tools, which would contain details about voters. The party has sent a message to campaigners to say what happened and to explain why the systems were working slowly on Monday.
This raises the obvious questions of who did this, and why did they do it now?
There is actually a fairly simple answer: A deadline is coming up for “Freepost” (in the US, they would be called “Business Reply Mail” leaflets, and currently the system to submit and gain approval for these mailers is offline.
Someone is monkey wrenching Labour voter organizing efforts.
Does anyone know about Labour candidates having big problems with party’s leaflet-creating website? One local campaign chief says: “it hasn’t been working properly & has now completely failed. Candidates can’t get their leaflets off it & approved. It appears to have been hacked.”— Michael Crick (@MichaelLCrick) November 11, 2019
— Michael Crick (@MichaelLCrick) November 11, 2019
I’m told that some Labour candidates fear that unless the party can resolve the problem very soon, then they could miss the deadline for getting their Freepost leaflets written, designed and approved— Michael Crick (@MichaelLCrick) November 11, 2019
This has been the case for some time, well before when the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee endorsed him in the PRIMARY.
Why would they endorse in the primary?
I’m sure that some will claim that this was just an oversight, but I believe that it was deliberate.
Where most of us see this sort of crap, and think, “Corruption,” but I think that Chuck Schumer and his Evil Minions™ see that and think, “He shares our values.”
Between Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Sherrod Brown, it makes it hard for Democrats to suck up to Wall Street, payday lenders, and oil companies, and the like, and another liberal in the Senate would make Chuck’s job just too damn hard:
The Colorado Independent Ethics Commission is expected to release an investigative report this week into allegations that John Hickenlooper, a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2020, violated state law by receiving free private jet rides and other gifts from corporations when he served as governor. While Hickenlooper has denied any wrongdoing, and last year the Denver Post editorial board said the complaint consisted of “politically motivated lies,” there are fears that the investigation stands to damage Hickenlooper’s chances in Colorado.
………
Some progressives worry that Hickenlooper, the current frontrunner and the Democratic Party’s preferred candidate, could fumble the party’s chances of flipping the seat if he is found guilty of violating the state ethics law. Hickenlooper, who abandoned his lagging presidential campaign in order to run for Senate in August, is one of eight Democrats vying for the chance to take on Sen. Cory Gardner, one of the most vulnerable Republicans heading into 2020. And though he was a popular governor and leads Gardner in head-to-head polls, Hickenlooper’s pro-fracking record could also be a liability in the primary, especially as voters’ anxieties over the climate crisis rise.
………
In August, The Intercept reported that former Colorado House Speaker Andrew Romanoff, a progressive candidate largely considered to be Hickenlooper’s main competition, called the DSCC’s intervention a “recipe for disaster.” He said that if voters are told that their voice doesn’t matter, “then why would they show up in November?
The original complaint focused on travel including a trip to the Bilderberg Meeting in Italy and related luxury lodging and transportation costs, such as a ride in a chauffeured Maserati limousine; a flight from Dallas, Texas, to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to attend the American Enterprise Institute’s Jackson Hole Symposium; and a private jet from New Jersey to Colorado. (In 2006, Colorado voters passed a constitutional amendment that created additional restrictions on gifts to elected officials, including a ban on gifts exceeding $53 per year.)
The complaint is being dismissed as a political hit job, and there is definitely an element of that, but Hickenlooper is literally a guy who literally drank fracking fluid to demonstrate his allegiance to the oil industry, so these allegations are going to stick.
And Chuck Schumer and the DSCC are backing him because they are worried about a real Democrat hurting the feelings of the K Street lobbyist crowds.
This is preliminary, but it looks like Democrats will take both houses of the Virginia state house in possibly the governorship of Kentucky.
it really does look like the Republicans slavish devotion to Donald Trump is something akin to the Heaven’s Gate cult.
Then again, my record of predictions sucks.
Argentina’s Peronists swept back into power on Sunday, ousting conservative president Mauricio Macri in an election result that shifts Latin America’s No. 3 economy firmly back toward the left after it was battered by economic crisis.
Peronist Alberto Fernandez had 47.79% of the vote, ahead of Macri’s 40.71%, with more than 90% of ballots counted, putting the center-left challenger over the 45% threshold to avoid a runoff and win the election outright.
Macri, speaking at his election party, conceded the race and congratulated Fernandez. He said he had invited Fernandez to the presidential palace on Monday to discuss an orderly transition, seen as essential for Argentina’s shaky economy and markets.
Here’s hoping that this is the beginning of a trend.
The standard neoliberal prescriptions create little more than misery.
Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party looks set to win 156 in Canada’s house of commons, significantly better than the the 121 currently netted by the conservatives.
He’ll need support from the progressive NDP (~25 seats, down from 39) and the Quebecois BQ (~30 seats up from 10) to form a coalition government.
One hopes that what are likely to be his new coalition partners can successfully push to move Canada away from the extraction economy.
Trudeau has been the tar sands industry and the TransCanada Corporation’s bitch in his last term.