Donald Trump on Friday said he would not debate Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders because it would be "inappropriate" to square off against the candidate who currently trails Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary fight.
"Based on the fact that the Democratic nominating process is totally rigged and Crooked Hillary Clinton and (Debbie) Wasserman-Schultz will not allow Bernie Sanders to win, and now that I am the presumptive Republican nominee, it seems inappropriate that I would debate the second-place finisher," Trump said in a statement.
The two populist candidates had floated the idea of debating each other throughout the week. Sanders has been trying to debate Clinton ahead of the California primary on June 7, but she, too, declined.
Speaking to reporters in Los Angeles, Sanders said he was disappointed that Trump changed his mind.
"I hope that he changes his mind again. Mr. Trump is known to change his mind many times in a day," Sanders said. "Trump is a bully, he's a big tough guy. Well, I say to Mr. Trump, what are you afraid of?"
Trump's announcement on Friday is a far cry from a statement he made the day before, when he told supporters in Bismark, North Dakota, that he'd "love to debate Bernie."
"He's a dream," the real estate magnate said. "If we can raise for maybe women's health issues or something. If we can raise $10 or $15 million for charity, which would be a very appropriate amount."
Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump used late-night TV appearances this week to hype a potential debate between them, so with the event now dead it was only fitting that Sanders would return to late night on Friday to knock Trump for backing out.
Groaning and shaking his fists in frustration, the senator from Vermont told HBO's Bill Maher he "would have loved to" debate the presumptive Republican presidential nominee before the California primary on June 7.
"First he said he would do it," Sanders said. "Then he said he wouldn't do it. Then he said he would do it. Then he said he wouldn't do it. So I would hope that if he changed his mind four times in two days, [he'd] change it a fifth time. You know, Trump claims to be a real tough guy, pushes people around. Hey, Donald, come on up. Let's have a debate about the future of America."
Maher, a Sanders supporter, piled on.
"Mr. Macho chickened out," he declared.
Sanders and Maher discussed other subjects, too, including a report this week by the State Department inspector general that criticized Clinton for her private email use as secretary of state. Sanders has consistently declined to hammer the likely Democratic nominee for a practice that even Clinton acknowledged was a "mistake." Maher seemed to wonder if Sanders would go on the attack, now that "the story has moved a little bit."
Sanders still refused to attack.
Sanders has been amid a presidential campaign blitz through Southern California. Friday morning, he stopped at the docks in San Pedro Friday - a part of the Vermont senator’s ambitious plan to reach 200,000 voters before the state’s June 7 primary.
The 30-minute speech before a crowd of about 1,000 mostly union dock workers - members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 13 - rarely mentioned Clinton, but he did take repeated shots at corporate America, Wall Street and the Republican’s presumptive presidential nominee, Donald Trump.
He said he was inspired by Pope Francis and the ideas of a “moral economy.”
“A moral economy is not an economy where CEOs make tens of millions of dollars a year, ship our jobs abroad and take away health care from their workers,” Sanders said. “That is the type of corporate culture that has got to be fundamentally changed. There is more to life than billionaires making more money.” Sanders has been buoyed by a recent California field poll that showed him trailing Democratic frontrunner Clinton by two points and recent overtures by Republican presumptive nominee Donald Trump’s suggestion the two have a debate.
Sanders didn’t address the debate proposal during the rally.
With the Vincent Thomas Bridge and the USS Iowa in the backdrop - the same battleship Trump spoke on in September at the beginning of his campaign - Sanders got a warm welcome from the ILWU workers and the crowd on the edge of Memorial Day Weekend.
The ILWU is made up of 60 local unions with about 42,000 members in California, Washington, Oregon, Alaska and Hawaii.
All week Bernie Sanders has galloped about California, showing up in places where presidential candidates usually don’t tread.
Sanders alluded to his all-over-the-place strategy on Thursday in Ventura, where he spoke to a crowd estimated at more than 8,000 people.
“We are holding rallies just like this up and down this state,” he said, calling his strategy, with some exaggeration, unprecedented “in California political history and by the end of this campaign here in California, I am confident that we will have personally met and spoken to over 200,000 Californians.”
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Here in Ventura County, 60% of the voters, or nearly a quarter of a million people, were eligible to vote in the primary before the final registrations were tallied.
Another factor makes the exurbs a potential goldmine for Sanders, in particular: While the state as a whole took a giant hit during the Great Recession, the exurbs were particularly hard hit.
Residents who weathered long commutes and stretched financially to buy more affordable housing found their equity destroyed; at one point nearly 1 in 5 Inland Empire borrowers was behind on a home loan during the depths of the recession, and more were underwater on their homes.
Some of the areas still feel the pinch of job loss — both Riverside and San Bernardino counties have higher unemployment rates than the state as a whole. That would seem to make at least some residents more receptive to Sanders’ condemnation of Wall Street’s actions leading up to the recession and his plan to break up the big banks.
Campaigning among those residents reinforces the Vermont senator’s message that he is the candidate of the working class, not the elites, his campaign believes.
On Tuesday, at a rally in Orange County, Sen. Bernie Sanders finally learned how to pronounce Cenk Uygur’s name. In Irvine, it had been “Chenk.” Once, it was “Senk.” This time, at Anaheim’s air-conditioned convention center, Cenk Uygur introduced Sanders, the senator thanked “Jenk YOO-ger,” and the crowd cheered.
“A lot of you know the Young Turks?” asked Sanders, referring to the online news empire Uygur launched in 2002. The cheers gave him his answer. “We live in a world where the corporate media, people who own our country, give us their definition of reality. What Cenk and a few other people are trying to do is give us a different perspective on reality; the reality facing the middle class, working people.”
Uygur was beaming, but he had to race up the freeway to his Culver City studio. The Young Turks, which has grown in surges since before the dawn of YouTube, has become something akin to the state network of the “political revolution.” Its hosts run from the merely Sanders-philiac, like Uygur, to the Sanders-obsessed, like comedian Jimmy Dore. Sanders was scheduled to give the Young Turks his second interview Friday in just two months.
“In the old days, TV had a lot of power, but that’s shifting now,” Uygur said in an interview at TYT’s Culver City headquarters, a former bar that’s home to two fully outfitted studios, a shelf of awards and an iguana mascot — Mayaguana — who just showed up one day. “So we’d better figure out how to use that power for the issues we care about, because cable TV is worse than propaganda. It’s marketing for the rich and powerful.”
Sanders’s campaign for president has sent progressives in search of friendlier media, especially since he fell prohibitively behind Hillary Clinton in the delegate hunt. Formerly reliable sources of news and analysis, like MSNBC, began to look like Clinton PR; comic anchors from Trevor Noah to Samantha Bee to John Oliver have mocked the Sanders voters who can’t see that he’s losing.
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“MSNBC and CNN are horrible,” said Afton Tarin, 30, a photographer who attended the Anaheim rally. “Cenk is really big on making sure he explains what the media is saying, and explains the reality it’s not covering. I’m seeing these events from the same perspective. Nevada’s a good example. MSNBC said we were throwing chairs. I watched every video — nobody threw a chair. And Cenk was honest about that.”
For Californians resolved to one day entering a dispensary and purchasing pre-rolled joints or marijuana-infused cookies — all for recreational use — a high-profile ally who lives 3,000 miles away has emerged.
As Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders darts across the state ahead of the June 7 Democratic presidential primary, he’s seamlessly woven into his pitch to voters an unyielding message of support for an effort that would legalize recreational pot in California.
“It makes sense to legalize marijuana at this particular point," Sanders told supporters this week on a dusty softball field at a park in East Los Angeles where, like at many of his outdoor events in California, a slightly pungent pot aroma wafted through the air. “So if I were here in your state, I would vote yes on that issue."
For Sanders, down in delegates and faced with an uphill climb against Hillary Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, his endorsement of the measure appears to be an effort to corral support. A poll released Wednesday by the Public Policy Institute of California showed 60% of residents support legalizing pot, and referencing the issue at each of his rallies in Southern California this week often garnered Sanders the loudest applause at each event.
The proposed Adult Use of Marijuana Act would, among other things, allow adults 21 and older to purchase up to an ounce of marijuana for recreational use and to grow as many as six plants in their home. A retail tax of 15% would be imposed on all sales.
“There’s this broader dialogue about the distribution of income, and Bernie is not the only person who is concerned,” economist tells TheWrap
Bernie Sanders says The Walt Disney Company underpays and exploits its employees. CEO Bob Iger shot back that Disney is a massive economic force in the U.S., pointedly asking Sanders: “How many jobs have you created?”
So, who is right?
The answer, not unlike American politics or running a global entertainment company, isn’t so simple.
“I’m not sure why Bernie decided to take Disney to task, we have quite a number of large employers that do rely heavily on low-or-minimum-wage employees for a big part of their business,” Dr. Robert Kleinhenz, an economist and director of research at California-based Beacon Economics, told TheWrap.
“[Disney’s] got a huge payroll … in that sense one should be pleased that it’s large and employs people in a wide array of pay scale, with talents ranging from business acumen to those who walk down Main Street Disney and have to pick up trash,” Kleinhenz said.
But Sanders, addressing a rally in Anaheim on Tuesday, spoke to the quality of those wages. In both Florida and California, Disney will escalate its minimum wage to state requirements of $10 and $10.50, respectively, by 2017. But Sanders decried the amount after the record-breaking $2.8 billion first-quarter profits the company posted this year, largely due to the success of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.”
Sanders, whose campaign hinges on his criticism of the 1 percent, also referenced a lawsuit brought last year by 250 Disney employees, some of whom were forced to help their outsourced replacements transition into their own jobs before they were let go.
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In any event, tangling with the monolithic Disney got Sanders plenty of ink.
“It raises his profile and gets a lot of headline attention,” Kleinhenz concluded. “But he’s making some good points about some challenges that we have in our economy and our society.”
Calls for DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign are at all-time highs after her recent comments to CNN in which she propagated the false narrative that Bernie Sanders’ supporters acted inappropriately at the Nevada Democratic State Convention.
“Unfortunately, the Senator’s response was anything but acceptable. It certainly did not condemn his supporters for acting violently or engaging in intimidation tactics, and instead added more fuel to the fire” Ms. Wasserman Schultz told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. She went on to compare the campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.
Backlash incited by her comments inspired The Washington Post to flag “Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s worst week in Washington,” and MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski to demand the DNC chair’s resignation—possibly the first call to action from a mainstream media pundit. Ms. Wasserman Schultz, who served as Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign co-chair, has been favoring Ms. Clinton throughout the Democratic primaries.
The last thing the Democratic Establishment expected was for Mr. Sanders’ campaign to take off as it did, and as soon as the Senator emerged as a viable threat to Ms. Clinton’s smooth-sailing campaign, Ms. Wasserman Schultz and the rest of the Party fell into a state of panic.
Yet corruption runs deep through the veins of the Party, extending much further beyond the DNC chair. With the growing divide between Sanders and Clinton supporters, the mainstream media’s quickest-fix has been to position Ms. Wasserman Schultz as a scapegoat for the Democrats’ poor treatment of Mr. Sanders throughout the campaign—even though she’s certainly not the only leader to obstruct democracy.
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The media spent more time sensationalizing false narratives about Bernie Sanders’ supporters than discussing his campaign’s policy proposals, coining the pejorative term ‘Bernie-Bro’ to stereotype all Sanders supporters as sexist white males. The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald wrote in January 2016, “The concoction of the ‘Bernie Bro’ narrative by pro-Clinton journalists has been a potent political tactic—and a journalistic disgrace.”
The media has whitewashed Mr. Sanders’ campaign—pushing the hashtag #BernieMadeMeWhite to trend in March 2016—and has been so trigger-happy to disparage Bernie Sanders that they falsely claimed Congressman John Lewis criticized Mr. Sanders and then failed to remove the inaccurate stories after the civil rights icon clarified that his remarks were not criticism.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders joined three fellow Democrats in urging Attorney General Loretta Lynch to continue its inquiry into “the fossil fuel industry’s climate denial operation,” a day after Senate Republicans called on her to cease any such probe.
“We write today to urge that you view the Republican Senators’ May 25 letter as Exhibit A among the reasons why the Department of Justice should take a full and honest look at possible fraud in the fossil fuel industry’s climate denial operation,” said the Thursday letter.
In addition to Mr. Sanders, the letter was signed by Democratic Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Jeff Merkley of Oregon.
Ms. Lynch said at a Senate oversight hearing in March that she had referred information on what Mr. Whitehouse described as “the climate denial scheme” to the FBI. Senate Republicans have slammed the effort as an attack on free speech and scientific inquiry.
In their letter, the Democrats argued that “fraud is not protected by the First Amendment,” drawing comparisons between the tobacco industry and oil-and-gas companies that have taken a skeptical view of catastrophic climate-change predictions.
“It would be a sorry world in which corporations engaged in fraud could pull the screen of the First Amendment over any investigation of their fraud,” said the Democrats’ letter.
Bernie Sanders apparently knows where the hood’s at. The Vermont senator who has won over hip-hop artists such as Nas, Big Boi and Killer Mike while on the primary trail emerged for a campaign rally in Lancaster, California, Thursday as DMX’s “Where the Hood At” thumped in the background. The song choice got the crowd, as they say, lit.
Sanders is no stranger to hip-hop culture at this point. The silver-haired senator from the very white state of Vermont has been burnishing his 'hood credentials for months now, picking up endorsements from influential rappers and even making a stop at the Coachella music festival in California. While such moves might not help Sanders defeat Clinton, who is far ahead in the race for delegates, they’ve certainly endeared him to many hip-hop artists and their fans. Below are Sanders’ nine most hip-hop moments on the campaign trail.
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1. Killer Mike helped introduce the hip-hop community to Sanders in November when he introduced the Democratic presidential candidate to a crowd of 5,000 at Atlanta’s Fox Theater. “I have said in many a rap, I don’t trust the church or the government, a Democrat, Republican, a pope, a bishop or those other men,” the rapper said. “But after spending five hours tonight, after spending five hours with someone who has spent the last 50 years radically fighting for your rights and mine, I can tell you that I am very proud tonight to announce the next president of the United States, Senator Bernie Sanders.”
Mike’s relationship with Sanders grew after the men ate fried chicken and yams together at Atlanta’s Busy Bee Cafe and then discussed policy issues at Mike’s barbershop, the SWAG Shop. The Atlanta rapper has since introduced Sanders at various campaign rallies.
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9. Sanders travels with Mel, a world-renowned, Austin-based DJ who got the tunes flowing on President Barack Obama’s re-election night in 2012. Among the songs Mel has played to get the crowds roaring for Sanders are George Clinton’s “Not Just Knee-Deep” and a sample from Dre's “The Next Episode.” He is likely the one who decided to pump out DMX at the Lancaster rally.
“I believe in Bernie,” Mel told The Observer.
Hillary Clinton’s refusal to keep a promise to debate Sen. Bernie Sanders in California was obviously based on her assumption that the nomination is hers and that there is no need to risk further exposure in an uncontrolled setting.
If her premise were true, it might make sense from a purely strategic standpoint, even if it would represent a flat-out retreat from a pledge she made in February to participate in a California debate in May. The Clinton campaign no doubt figured that whatever flak she might encounter for the broken promise would be preferable to the potential of a gaffe or awkward debate moment that might go viral.
However, a Public Policy Institute of California poll released late Wednesday suggested that state voters do not necessarily agree that the Democratic primary is a settled issue.
The poll showed Clinton and Sanders in a dead heat, with the former secretary of state at 46 percent and the Vermont senator at 44 percent among likely Democratic primary voters. It also showed her less than invincible in a general election, with a 49 to 39 percent lead over Donald Trump in a state where GOP registration is just 28 percent.
Sanders, who had been pressing Clinton to keep her debate commitment, said she “may want to be not quite so presumptuous about thinking that she is a certain winner.”
The Chronicle had been prepared to partner on the California debate with Fox News, which proved superior to other networks in instilling substance and control into primary debates. The Clinton campaign also has been unresponsive to repeated requests to meet with our editorial board. Sanders did so on May 10, taking all questions and allowing the session to be live-streamed and archived on The Chronicle’s Facebook page.
Clinton is a prohibitive favorite to attain the party’s nomination before its Philadelphia convention. Still, Californians deserve more than a succession of rallies, photo opportunities and fundraisers from a major presidential candidate. They deserve a chance to fully compare and contrast the two remaining candidates on everything from the federal reach on state issues such as water and high-speed rail to their differing visions of the role of a global superpower.
Preparation for presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ campaign rally Saturday evening at the Kern County Fairgrounds were in full swing Friday.
At the event, dubbed “A Future to Believe In Bakersfield Rally,” Sanders plans on discussing a wide range of issues, including, according to a campaign statement, “getting big money out of politics, his plan to make public colleges and universities tuition-free, combating climate change and ensuring universal health care.”
Local lead volunteer Neel Sannappa said that as of Thursday about 4,500 people had made reservations to attend the event.
The doors open at 4 p.m., and the program is set to begin at 7 p.m. Attendees must enter through Gates 38 or 39, and limited parking will be available in the Union Avenue and P Street lots.
The rally is free and open to the public but organizers encourage people to RSVP ahead of time.
To RSVP, go to https://go.berniesanders.com/page/event/detail/rally/gpgwj8.
Sanders’ tour includes stops at Santa Maria and Santa Barbara on Saturday and Fresno on Sunday.