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The 25 Million Dollar Man:
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont raised more than $24 million for his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in the last three months, a significant sum that was fueled by a torrid pace of online donations: more than a million so far.
Sanders advisers, in announcing the fund-raising tally on Wednesday night, also said that the senator had more than $25 million in cash on hand.
His leading Democratic opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton, is expected to announce her fund-raising numbers soon. As of June 30, the close of the second quarter, Mrs. Clinton had $28.9 million in cash on hand compared to $12.2 million for Mr. Sanders.
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The latest estimates suggest that Mr. Sanders has spent $15 million on his campaign so far — a large amount, considering that he has yet to make traditionally expensive expenditures on political commercials or polling. Advisers said that most of the spending went to the online fund-raising operation and to hiring staff. Mr. Sanders has 49 paid workers in Iowa, 43 in New Hampshire, 21 at his campaign headquarters in Burlington, Vt., and 27 elsewhere. He also has 15 offices in Iowa and nine in New Hampshire.
The campaign has also paid for a direct-mail program to reach potential donors and supporters and to rent arenas and other large venues in major cities for Mr. Sanders’s large campaign rallies. A full record of his campaign spending will be released by mid-October.
One Million Individual Donations:
With hours to go before the third quarter campaign finance filing deadline, the campaign of Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders said it reached its goal of one million individual online contributions.
He is the first candidate of the 2016 campaign to announce it had reached this number – and he reached it faster than President Barack Obama did in 2008 and 2012.
The Sanders campaign has touted its goal of hitting one million online donations by tonight’s deadline to spur more individuals to donate.
Mr. Obama reached one million donations in his 2008 campaign in February of that year. In 2012, his campaign announced that they had reached one million donations in October 2011.
3 Reasons Bernie Will Win:
Bernie Sanders will be the next President of the United States, due in part to three big factors that have nothing to do with him. Full disclosure: I love Bernie Sanders. He's a statesman and seems like a good person, if not the best singer. As a fellow "loony liberal," I've admired him for years, but I would never have expected him to be doing as well as he is now. And while I'm clearly in the tank for him, here's what I think is going to make Bernie's unlikely presidency a reality:
The unattended flame of progressive sentiment from Barack Obama's 2008 campaign has sparked into a bonfire of liberal awareness, despite policy makers, including the president, failing to act on the temperature of public opinion on anything until it hurts them politically to be against it.
The DNC Establishment is backing Hillary Clinton because "it's her turn," despite an exhaustive record of too-late corrections on vital issues, negative public perception, and toxic policy-related baggage from her husband's presidency. The DNC expects liberals to nominate a hawk funded by corporations profiting from policies that demand radical change? Yeah, not so much.
Donald Trump is brutalizing the Republican field, Gladiator-style, while tarring both parties' establishment candidates with the same billion-dollar brush, and earning the support of extremists and idiots the GOP can't distance themselves from without undermining their basic legitimacy as a political party. Thankfully, he's entirely unelectable with zero support from the vast coalition of groups he's specifically offended.
Church Streets New Attraction:
Margery Jenkins and her granddaughter, Caroline Dougherty, were eating lunch on Church Street last Thursday when their waiter mentioned they were within walking distance of Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) presidential campaign office.
Dougherty, a liberal twentysomething from Greenwich, Conn., persuaded her Republican grandmother it should be a stop on their Burlington tour. They slipped through a nondescript door between Von Bargen's Jewelry and Rí Rá Irish Pub, rode an elevator up to the third floor and arrived at the pulsing nerve center of a presidential campaign for which everything seems to be going right.
"She's a Republican, but thinking Bernie is OK," Dougherty told Sanders' staff as grandmother and granddaughter scoured the front counter for Bernie bumper stickers, buttons and postcards.
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Two doors up from Burlington City Hall, where Sanders once served as mayor, and three blocks south of his Senate office, the presidential candidate's campaign office has become Church Street's latest draw.
Five months ago, this space contained barely enough people to field a basketball team. Now teeming with volunteers, it could staff a football team, including offense, defense, coaches and cheerleaders.
Ben & Jerry Speak For Bernie:
The American Sustainable Business Council (ASBC) opened with a lively debate between representatives from Sanders for President and Clinton for President. The ASBC invited the leading republican campaigns to attend as well, but they all declined.
“Our system isn’t broken, it’s rigged,” Ben Cohen explained as he took the stage with his longtime partner-in-crime Jerry Greenfield. In the allotted 15 minutes, the duo ran through a litany of inspiring platforms from the Sanders for President campaign, all designed to make our country more just and equitable: universal healthcare, college subsidies, capital infrastructure investments to reduce youth employment. To fund these feel-good policies, the Sanders campaign advocates ending the cap on social security payments (currently income over $130K is not subject to social security taxes), eliminating offshore tax havens, and finally, “billion dollar corporations that don’t pay taxes should be illegal.”
Jerry closed out their 15 minute platform by saying,
“Bernie has a comprehensive + specific platform. People respond because they know that he’s right. Bernie can get elected, does get elected, gets re-elected. Great leader. Great programs. Guy is honest, tells the truth. Voters are yearning for people who tell the truth, who aren’t ‘politics as usual.’…. It’s going to come down to big money vs. people power. We’ve seen people power win over and over IF people show up.
Bernie Dont Get No Respect...:
Bernie Sanders, as far as the media is concerned, is the Rodney Dangerfield of presidential candidates -- "he don't get no respect." Of the 23 candidates running for president in the two major parties, precisely four of them have ever shown even 20 percent support (in their polling averages from their base voters). Actually, to be completely accurate, five people have hit the 20 percent support level since the race began this year, but Joe Biden is not actually a candidate yet. The other four are Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders.
Andrew Tyndall, who monitors broadcast news from ABC, NBC, and CBS, has some numbers which starkly show Bernie's Rodney Dangerfield problem. Tyndall tracked the total time the three networks have devoted to the presidential race this year: 504 minutes. This is more than their coverage (to this point on the calendar) in 2011 (277 minutes) and 2007 (462 minutes), so it's not like they're shying away from covering the race or anything. Out of that total, 338 minutes this year has been aired about the Republican race, while only 128 minutes was centered on the Democratic race. Granted, the Republicans have more candidates, which might explain some of the lopsided nature of those numbers.
Even so, the numbers get even more jaw-droppingly uneven when you look at individual candidates. Donald Trump (of course) leads the pack in coverage of his campaign, clocking in at an impressive 145 minutes. Hillary Clinton has gotten 82 minutes of campaign coverage, and an additional 83 minutes devoted to the email scandal. Jeb Bush, who is currently polling in fifth place in the Republican race with less than 10 percent in the polls, has received 43 minutes of coverage. The Bernie Sanders campaign has received a grand total of eight minutes of coverage
Robert Reich On Why Sanders Is So Successful:
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich cited Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) honesty as the key to his presidential campaign in an interview on Wednesday with Democracy Now anchors Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez.
“I think he’s telling the truth,” Reich said. “And I think people are responding with extraordinary enthusiasm — even many conservatives and Republicans I meet — to a truth teller.”
Reich also said Sanders, an independent running for the Democratic Party nomination, was right in his call to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, though he actually “understated the reality” of the problems created by the influence the country’s biggest banks have.
“The five biggest banks, they used to have 10 percent of total banking assets back in 1990, now have 44 percent of total banking assets in this country,” Reich said. “I mean, they are far too big to fail. I mean, they are so large that, just because of their political clout and their scale, they are gaining more and more market share of the entire banking industry. That’s dangerous.”
An Opinion Piece:
Donald Trump, who’s wrong about nearly everything, is right about one thing. When politicians take huge donations from billionaires and corporate interests, they are “owned” by these billionaires and corporations. They end up working for the billionaires and corporations instead of ordinary Americans.
Democratic senator “Wall Street Chuck” Schumer has received, over his career, millions of dollars from the financial sector. In return, he has voted against virtually all efforts to regulate risky financial transactions. Republican Steve Daines, who received $416,000 from oil and gas interests in 2014, has pleased his donors by regularly denying that climate change is caused by the use of fossil fuels and by voting against any measures to regulate the industry.
Democratic friends have asked me why I’m supporting Bernie Sanders instead of Hillary Clinton in the upcoming presidential election. Here’s why. Unlike Schumer and Daines, Sanders has taken no money from billionaires and corporations. Since they don’t “own” him, he’s free to take on, for example, the large pharmaceutical companies whose obscene profits are driving up the cost of health care for all of us. And he’s free to take on the Wall Street bankers whose bribery and bullying of congress – they call it “lobbying” – have brought huge profits to them at the expense of the rest of us.
Who Has The Best College Plan?:
The differences between the college financing plans offered by Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are important - both for their impact on the middle class, and for what they tell us about the candidates and their governing philosophies.
Elementary and high school education is correctly seen as the bridge to a better future for young people. It is offered to all, at no cost, because we understand that society does better when the individuals within it do better.
When we made elementary school and high school free in the 1800s, the United States was a largely agrarian nation. The benefits a high school diploma provided back then - higher income, career opportunity, and the ability to fully participate in our democracy -often require a higher level of education in today's world. Will we provide them in the same democratic and progressive way our forebears did?
We know that our current system is broken. It has left more than 41 million Americans owing more than $1.3 trillion in student debt. That burden is holding back an entire generation of Americans and is harming the economy as a whole.
Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have had fundamentally different responses to this crisis. While those differences have been papered over by some in the media, as well as some progressive groups, they are real - and they are significant.
The Arts President:
“You have my promise that as president, I will be an arts president,” says Bernie Sanders matter-of-factly into the camera in a new two-minute video released by the Arts Action Fund. This pledge is backed up, he explains, by a “longstanding commitment to the arts and arts education,” which he has stood by during his decades in congress despite “terrible attacks by conservative ideologues.”
Sanders traces this governmental passion back to his tenure as mayor of Burlington, Vermont and the “street murals, performance art, and music festivals” he supported there through the Burlington Arts Council — thereby “hoping to unleash the creativity of our residents,” he says, “and harness the untold benefits that investment in the arts brings to our communities.”
Politico-speak aside, it’s a welcome message coming from someone who’s seeking influence over national funding — especially given the less than full-throated arts support indicated by some of the other candidates. Sanders, meanwhile, means business: “Art is speech. Art is what life is about,” he concludes, hammering home each word, before praising the work of the Arts Advocacy Caucus and eking out a quick smile.
Special Message
Here's How You Can Help snoopydawg, Charlie, and Abby
As many of you know, JekyllnHyde posted a fundraising diary this past Sunday afternoon on behalf of snoopydawg - snoopydawg is in Danger of Losing Her House and Beloved Woozles, Charlie and Abby. The objective was to prevent her house from going into foreclosure and being separated from her two beloved woozles, Charlie and Abby. We are very close to reaching the $5,000.00 fundraising goal, having raised $4,175.00 as of last night.
snoopydawg is a fabulous photographer as you can see from the many comments in JnH's diary, including these three comments - here, here, and here. I hope you'll consider buying a few prints as the holiday season is only a few weeks away.
Please help snoopydawg reach her goal and achieve a bit of financial stability. Thanks, LD
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- You can also help by recommending this diary, offering encouraging comments, republishing to your Daily Kos groups, linking to your Facebook pages, and helping to spread the word through Twitter.
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