Bernie On 'The View':
On Monday’s broadcast, the Democratic presidential hopeful got a chance to make the case as to why he can win and decried the disproportionate political influence of “a handful of billionaires." He also signed copies of a 1987 folk album he had recorded, begging Whoopi Goldberg and the show’s four other female co-hosts not to play it as his wife looked on from the audience.
“He recognizes this is part of the process,” explained Tad Devine, a longtime Democratic strategist who is advising Sanders. “He understands — to be elected president, the American people have to get to know him more. And, you know, we still are an insurgent campaign, and we have to take advantage of opportunities to communicate with millions of people.”
“The View” offered Sanders an opportunity to recount some of his talking points from the campaign trail and to advance an argument made over the weekend in Iowa that he has taken more consistently progressive positions than Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton.
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Co-host Raven-Symoné suggested that Sanders, 74, has broad support among younger voters and possesses “this Obama-like quality.”
Goldberg, meanwhile, closed the segment by saying that Sanders is “one of the smartest voices we’ve heard in a long time” and insisted that he come back for another appearance.
Sanders Hires A Pollster:
The Sanders campaign defended Monday their decision to hire former Howard Dean pollster Ben Tulchin, just a few days after Sanders knocked other politicians for taking politically convenient positions.
"Bernie has never been interested in polling but we convinced him we needed data for targeting," said Tad Devine, Sanders' top strategist, in a statement. "Now that we are going to do paid media next month, he approved having a pollster to give us the data we need to buy media correctly and target the ads."
Sanders' top aides, namely Devine, had been pushing for the campaign to hire a pollster, particularly because they wanted to test what aspects of the senator's stump speech were resonating and which aspects weren't.
But the candidate was resistant. Some aides had started to joke that Sanders was his own pollster.
Bernie And Baseball:
Long before he campaigned against corporate greed and an economy for the rich, a young Bernie Sanders learned his own painful lesson about big business. It came in the fall of 1957 when his neighborhood baseball team, the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles.
Sanders had just turned 16 and friends say he was devastated after Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley announced the transfer. The Dodgers had been an essential part of his childhood in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn where he could walk to their ballpark, Ebbets Field and buy a ticket for 60 cents. Even today he can name the Dodgers 1950s infield of Roy Campanella, Gil Hodges, Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese and Billy Cox. Then they were gone, whisked away to California.
The shock of their departure seems to have informed the Democratic presidential candidate’s early view of the world, so much so that some of his closest friends and confidants wonder if the incident helped inspire his political ideology today.
“I asked him: ‘Did this have a deep impact on you?’ and he said: ‘Of course! I thought the Dodgers belonged to Brooklyn,’” says Richard Sugarman, who is one of the Democratic frontrunner’s closest friends. “It does lay out the question of who owns what.”
Sanders Joins A Verizon Workers Protest:
Democratic presidential hopeful and self-described socialist Bernie Sanders condemned Verizon during a protest Monday of company workers discontent with management.
Verizon and the Communications Workers of America (CWA) are struggling to arrive at a new labor contract. The new agreement will impact upwards of 39,000 unionized workers. Workers have held several rallies and protests to express their opposition to how the company is handling the negotiations. At their latest rally, they were joined by Sanders, who urged Verizon to negotiate a fair contract.
“All over this country, Verizon is a metaphor,” Sanders told the crowd, according to Business Insider. “You’ve got corporate America making huge profits, their CEOs getting huge compensation packages. And then with all of their money, what they do is hire lawyers in order to make it harder for workers to survive in this country.”
During his speech, Sanders addressed several key issues. The main being allegation Verizon has illegally taken steps to stop workers from unionizing. The Associated Press reports the union has claimed the company fired Bianca Cunningham over expressing her right to organize. Verizon disputes the claim. Sanders also demands Verizon create more broadband networks, an issue the union is pushing as well.
Bernie Sanders Is Serious About A Political Revolution:
When William Lloyd Garrison launched his crusading abolitionist newspaper The Liberator in 1831 -- at a time when Congress refused even to debate the issue of slavery, and three long decades before America would finally confront the sin of human bondage -- he acknowledged that his call for the "immediate and complete emancipation of all slaves" was going to upset the polite politics and empty calculations of the elites.
"I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity?" Garrison wrote. "I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest -- I will not equivocate -- I will not excuse -- I will not retreat a single inch -- AND I WILL BE HEARD."
After Bernie Sanders delivered a fiery address to the Iowa Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner Saturday night, in which the independent senator contrasted his record with that of more cautious politicians, the official Twitter account of the Democratic presidential contender featured the last line from Garrison's declaration. At a pivot point in the long competition for the Democratic nomination, when many pundits are writing a next narrative for the 2016 presidential race, in which front-runner Hillary Clinton is again recognized by political and media elites as the prohibitive favorite, Sanders is signaling that he intends not just to fight on but to wage an edgier, more aggressive campaign that will not equivocate.
Rachel Maddow: The differences between the candidates on DOMA matters:
Hillary Clinton's version of what happened when the Defense of Marriage Act was signed by her husband took another sharp jab on Monday night.
In another The Rachel Maddow Show interview, this time with opponent Bernie Sanders, the Democratic frontrunner for the presidential nomination was called out in definitive terms for revising history. Perhaps more importantly, Maddow herself told viewers that the contrast between Clinton and Sanders on this point is real.
"There is a difference now, I have to say, between presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton," said Maddow into the camera, having interviewed Clinton on Friday.
"Even though there is no issue now, no difference now, between them in terms of what policies they support now, there is a difference between them as candidates," she said, "as to whether or not President Bill Clinton signing that antigay law, whether that was an antigay and lamentable mistake that never should have happened, or whether — as Secretary Clinton argued here on Friday night — it was actually a well meaning effort, a well meaning effort to head off a greater harm that would have been done had President Bill Clinton not signed that discriminatory bill."
Bernies Pot Stance Gets High Marks:
As U.S. Sen. Rand Paul’s presidential campaign goes to pot, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders stands to roll up some of his supporters — marijuana advocates and weed purveyors.
Sanders, the first presidential candidate to support marijuana legalization, got a bump from the nation’s largest pot advocacy group yesterday. The Marijuana Policy Project boosted Sanders’ voter guide report card score from a “B” to an “A” after the Democratic Socialist said he’d vote for Nevada’s pot legalization initiative if he lived in the state.
That places Sanders ahead of Paul, who scored an “A-.” And it’s not just blowing smoke: The move could mean growing vocal and financial support from what could plume into a
$4 billion industry by the end of 2016. With a number of states — including Massachusetts — on track to put the issue of marijuana legalization on the ballot next year, the burgeoning industry is starting to flex its political muscle.
“The issue is front and center in a way that it hasn’t been before in a presidential election,” said Taylor West, deputy director of marijuana business trade group the National Cannabis Industry Association.
Colorado Could Lead The Nation:
This week, proponents of a new initiative called ColoradoCare say they turned in enough signatures to a put a question before voters that, if passed in November 2016, would make Colorado the first state in the nation with a universal health care system.
The move has already drawn a response from Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is running for president as a Democrat.
“Colorado could lead the nation in moving toward a system to ensure better health care for more people at less cost,” Sanders said in a statement to The Colorado Independent. “In the richest nation on earth, we should make health care a right for all citizens. No one should go bankrupt or skip getting the care they need because they cannot afford it.”
Sanders wants universal health care at the federal level paid through the government in a Medicare-for-all model.
In Colorado, the program here would be called ColoradoCare and would do for Colorado what Medicare does for seniors.
Bernie Sanders and Black Lives Matter Starts New Seminary Co-Op Series:
The Seminary Cooperative Bookstore kicks off a new series with a reading Thursday on Bernie Sanders and the Black Lives Matters movement.
The “Literary Public Sphere” series is an attempt to bring writers back to the center of current topics in politics and culture.
The series starts with a 6 p.m. Thursday reading by Charles Mills, a philosophy professor at Northwestern University and author of “The Racial Contract and From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism.”
Bankers For Bernie:
Even by the standards of high finance, Black, 41, can claim membership in an ultra-exclusive club. He belongs to a small minority defying stereotypes and shattering taboos across New York City’s finer eateries and trading pits this primary season: Wall Street financiers who support the presidential bid of Vermont’s self-described “socialist” senator, Bernie Sanders.
“I don’t know anybody in this industry who supports Bernie,” one financier who gave to Sanders writes in an email. “I’m not aware of anyone else who might also be a Bernie supporter,” writes another, a former financial analyst at Goldman Sachs. “Best I can tell, I am the only one,” writes a third, while confessing to being hung over from a night out with clients.
But a dive into Sanders’ donor rolls from the second and third quarters reveals that of the tens of thousands of Americans listed as contributors on Sanders’ campaign finance reports, well over a hundred work in the financial services sector. Most are west of the Mississippi at small firms and local bank branches, where Sanders’ calls to rein in Wall Street do not hit so close to home. More noteworthy are the lonely few—roughly two dozen—who work in high finance in Manhattan.
Sure they’re capitalists, but they’re also iconoclasts—Wade Black’s Twitter feed includes several retweets of the dissident journalist Glenn Greenwald and the contrarian finance blog Zerohedge. They do not worship at the altar of the market, and having seen the American economic system from the inside, they’ve come to agree with Sanders’ conclusion that the game is rigged in favor of the well connected and a handful of big banks.
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