Politico: Bernie Sanders has made 2020 presidential announcement video

Bernie Sanders apparently is about to put out the official signal.

Politico reports today:

Bernie Sanders, inching closer to a second bid for the White House, has recorded a campaign video in which he says he is running for president in 2020, according to two people familiar with the spot.

It’s the latest sign the independent senator, the runner-up in the 2016 contest for the Democratic nomination, is nearing a presidential announcement.

Another hint that Sanders is getting closer to a launch: As Politico reported this week, the Sanders team has been interviewing people for top staff positions. Chuck Rocha, a political consultant who advised Sanders’ 2016 campaign, is expected to join him again if a second bid materializes.

It is unclear when, or even whether, the Sanders video will be released. It’s possible that Sanders could launch a 2020 campaign with an exploratory committee and then formally declare his candidacy later, a route other presidential candidates, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, have taken. …

I long have assumed that Bernie would run again. As I noted recently, he’d be crazy not to.

Bernie didn’t go away after his surprisingly narrow loss to Queen Billary in 2016. He has remained in the spotlight, introducing such progressive legislation as Medicare for All, most notably (most of the top-tier candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination signed on to Bernie’s Medicare for All bill), and he released three books after the November 2016 election and has traveled to numerous states since then.

Bernie remains popular — he remains the most popular elected official in the United States — and takes second place only to Joe Biden in reputable nationwide polling of 2020 Democratic Party presidential preference.

If Joe Biden runs, once he starts running his center-right mouth again, the voters will be reminded of why they passed him up on his first two runs for president in 1988 and in 2008, I predict, so Bernie is a strong contender for the nomination.

Not only that, but fivethirtyeight.com’s Nate Silver recently noted that past elections indicate that the more candidates who run in a presidential primary, the more difficult it is for party establishmentarians to ensure that their favorite candidate emerges as the nominee. Silver concludes:

… But the past electoral cycles where the field was nearly as big as this one shouldn’t exactly be comforting to [establishmentarian] Democrats, and it should be particularly worrying for next-in-line candidates such as Biden.

Democratic voters like a lot of their choices and feel optimistic about their chances of beating Trump in 2020. The large field is both a sign that there may not be consensus about the best candidate and a source of unpredictability.

Indeed, 2020 won’t be 2016, in which Bernie and Billary were the only two viable candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination. Recall that no other high-profile Democrat, including Elizabeth Warren, dared to run against Queen Billary in 2016; Bernie was the only U.S. senator who had the balls to do that.

So while Bernie isn’t polling at No. 1 (yet), again, Joe Biden, with his stale Clintonian pro-corporate centrism, is, in my book, a weak candidate given the Democratic Party base’s ongoing shift to the left. Billary either didn’t see that shift or believed that she safely could ignore it, and instead offered only rehashed Clintonism (always served cold) — and look how that turned out for her.

And (along with what Nate Silver stated) with so many Democratic candidates running, of course Bernie stands to gain from not having to face just one establishmentarian opponent, as he faced only Queen Billary in 2016, but in 2019 and 2020 he faces several establishmentarian opponents who are splintering the establishmentarian vote, including five other sitting U.S. senators.*

And, of course, because Bernie won 22 states and 46 percent of the democratically earned delegates in the 2016 primary battle, he starts off already fairly strong. Indeed, unlike the other, weaker candidates who already have announced, Bernie hasn’t had to jump in yet because he already has a sizable base of support.

Finally, the Democratic National Committee that rigged the game for Billary in 2016 — both Elizabeth Warren and Donna Brazile have said that the DNC indeed rigged the game for Billary — is not the same DNC of today.

Former DNC chair and Billarybot Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was incredibly corrupt, resigned in disgrace, and new chair Tom Perez is much more decent and fair; Team Bernie got some important DNC reforms, most notably the reining in of the anti-democratic “super-delegates” who helped Billary “win” (by making her appear to be inevitable [like with the Borg, resistance reportedly was futile]) before we peons even got to participate in a primary election or caucus; and Clintonism, for the most part, died when Billary tanked in November 2016.

My guess is that once Bernie’s second presidential bid is official, not only will his poll numbers go up and Biden’s and (most) everyone else’s will go down, but his pre-existing army of supporters from 2016 will flood his campaign coffers with individual donations (I sure will!).

We Berners aren’t dead; we are diehards and we’ve just been waiting for Bernie’s bat signal, and once it is illuminating the sky, it’s on.

—

*Those five senators are Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren.

Booker, Gillibrand and Klobuchar indisputably are establishmentarian party hacks, and Harris, in my book, is just co-opting Bernie’s positions in order to try to siphon off some of his support.

I have lived in California for more than 20 years now, and Harris never has been a remarkable progressive. She never has taken a position that wasn’t politically safe for her. (She publicly opposes such things as lynching — as though that were a bold, controversial stance, as though a majority of Americans support lynchings and as though lynchings still were commonplace. [Next, she’ll boldly come out against slavery!])

And Elizabeth Warren — I’m falling out of love with her. Not only is she not campaigning well, including the “Pocahontas” stuff, but she was too much of a party hack to oppose Billary in 2016 and she won’t call herself a democratic socialist, but either truly believes that capitalism can be reformed (it cannot be) or is just too fucking cowardly to embrace democratic socialism, as she was too cowardly to face Billary in 2016.

Liz Warren is more of an establishmentarian Democrat than anything else. (Also, of course, she used to be a Repugnican as late as the 1990s. Oh, yeah.)

On civility and the lack thereof

Updated below (on Thursday, June 28, 2018)

It’s feeling like it’s long past time to become “civil” again…

The writers of fivethirtyeight.com today posted an interesting chat on the topic of civility.

I agree, as usual, with Nate Silver’s take on civility (as I understand his take on it, anyway): There’s a huge difference between a full-on assault on democracy and merely rude words or actions.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders-Goebbels being asked to leave a quaint restaurant because she’s a Nazi spokesweasel, for instance: not actually a threat to the bedrock of our democracy. My calling Sarah Huckabee Sanders-Goebbels “Sarah Huckabee Sanders-Goebbels”: also not actually a threat to the bedrock of our democracy. (Neither is profanity, but over the years I’ve been slammed for my use of profanity here, even while our democracy is dismantled by fascist traitors, piece by piece, before our very fucking eyes.)

The Repugnican Party, under the “leadership” of Senate Majority “Leader” Yertle McConnell, refusing to allow former President Barack Obama to appoint a successor to the late U.S. Supreme Court “Justice” Antonin Scalia, even though Obama still had more than 11 months left in his presidency when Scalia kicked the bucket in February 2016, not only was uncivil, but it violated the nation’s preceding history and tradition, destroyed any trust that anyone possibly could have in the Repugnican Party to act in good faith ever fucking again, dealt yet another bloody blow to our democracy like the head of a helpless baby harp seal, and, in my book, violated the U.S. Constitution*, which all of the traitors of the Repugnican Party who participated in the Neil Gorsuch debacle had taken an oath to uphold, not to shit and piss upon.

Further, in my book, it was a treasonous act. Why? Because the majority of the American voters had voted Obama in for a second term in November 2012. (I was not one of them, but I recognize that he won the presidential election fairly and squarely, entirely unlike our last two Repugnican “presidents.”)

When the American voters gave Obama a second term, they knew fully well that the possibility existed that one of the members of the U.S. Supreme Court might die or otherwise become incapacitated during his second term. And they chose Obama, not Mittens Romney or the Repugnican Party, to be the one to make that decision.

But while the scaly Scalia’s body was still warm (well, the reptile probably never was warm, but that’s the saying), Yertle McConnell proclaimed, “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.”

Acting as though he was following the will of “the American people,” Yertle McConnell of course instead was following the will of his own craven, right-wing, anti-democratic party. He chose political expediency over doing the right thing, and, again, in my view, because he brazenly subverted the will of the American people as they had expressed it in the presidential election November 2012, Yertle committed treason. The people had voted; he then told them to go fuck themselves.

(No, not literally. Because that, you see, would have been “uncivil,” and we cannot have any incivility! It’s perfectly fine to commit treason, you see, but to cuss is the worst thing that you can do [well, outside of tossing the hungry, hungry Sarah Huckabee Sanders-Goebbels from a restaurant].)

That’s how the Repugnicans operate: They fastidiously strain out tiny gnats yet gulp camels whole (except, of course, they find it in their three-chambered reptilian hearts to make exception after exception for “President” Pussygrabber’s incessant vulgarities).

And it’s funny — Pussygrabber recently called the 5-4 Gorsuch Court’s** ruling upholding his hateful, discriminatory ban on Muslims from the United States to be “a tremendous victory for the American people and the Constitution.”

Bullshit.

The treasonous (redundant) Repugnican Party, acting in bad faith and treasonously against the wishes of the American people that they already had articulated via the democratic process, denied our nation’s first black president the right that at least in modern history had been granted to every previous (and white) president without hesitation: the right to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Such a treasonous subversion of our Constitution and our democracy — and anything that stems from it — is no “victory for the American people and the Constitution.”

Neil Gorsuch, like “President” Pussygrabber, is illegitimate. Yes, it matters how you came into a position of power, whether you did it legitimately and fairly or whether you did it illegitimately and unfairly.

Millions of more voters cast their votes for Billary Clinton than for Pussygrabber, yet we tell our young people to vote, that their votes matter, even though at least twice in my lifetime, two of our “presidents” didn’t even fucking win the highest number of votes.

Because Obama was denied his constitutional right, as president, to fulfill a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court when he still had more than 11 full months in office to go, Gorsuch always will be illegitimate to me, as will be all of his decisions, all of which only can be the fruit of the poisonous tree (even if he should ever make a decision that I actually agree with).

The only good news in all of this is that the Repugnican traitors have to cheat to “succeed.” They can’t win the popular vote (and have to have the help of Russia to even win the Electoral College, which should have been abolished ages ago) and they have to subvert laws and historical norms to get what they want.

And I’m thinking that even given their reptilian brains, they have to know, in the back of their tiny little minds, that when they celebrate their “victories,” like today’s 5-4 Gorsuch Court summary execution of public-sector labor unions (which had been on the right-wing wish list for many, many years), it’s actually quite fucking hollow, because they had to fucking cheat to get those “victories.”

Another blog post, of course, is why we, the people, have allowed such bullshit as stolen presidential elections, bogus wars and stolen U.S. Supreme Court seats.

It might start with our apparent mass belief that we decent folk must at all times be “civil” — a belief that our treasonous, anti-democratic enemies on the right have demonstrated amply that they do not at all share.

Update (Thursday, June 28, 2018): I neglected to mention above that in April 2017, Yertle McConnell also had taken the “nuclear option” and changed long-standing Senate rules so that Neil Gorsuch could be confirmed by a simple majority of the senators instead of by 60 of them, as was the tradition. Gorsuch thereby was confirmed by only 54 votes.

Again, to get Gorsuch on the bench, the treasonous Repugnicans had to cheat — big time. I mean, it’s fucking uber-blatant: Losing? Just change the rules! Lower the bar so that you “win”!

Also, Yertle actually uttered these words yesterday after Supreme Court “Justice” Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement: “The Senate stands ready to fulfill its constitutional role by offering advice and consent … We will vote to confirm Justice Kennedy’s successor this fall.” (Was Yertle trolling us or is his pathological hypocrisy truly so egregious that he truly sees nothing wrong with it?)

So when the Repugnicans have the chance to fill a vacancy on the nation’s highest court, time is of the essence — the Constitution says so! But when a Democratic president (especially a black one) has the chance to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court, he must be stonewalled for a year! It’s only fair!

The treasonous wingnuts among us treat the Constitution like they treat the Bible — they pick and choose, emphasize and ignore, based upon what is most politically and personally convenient for them at the moment. One moment it’s a sacred fucking document, and the next moment it’s toilet paper, to be used accordingly.

I always have been able to articulate exactly why I detest the Repugnican traitors (redundant) among us; for me it’s not rank tribalism. They get away with their treason only because we, the people, thus far haven’t done to them what they deserve to have done to them, but if they push the envelope much further — such as try to reverse Roe vs. Wade or actually try to revoke same-sex marriage — that might change.

Revolt always has been and always will be is a legitimate response to tyranny. When your democracy is being destroyed systematically by self-serving traitors whose lack of decency and lack of good faith know no bounds, it’s the only legitimate response.

—

*Yertle McConnell’s only loophole is that the U.S. Constitution does not give the U.S. Senate an actual, explicit deadline to vote on a new justice/“justice” to the U.S. Supreme Court after a vacancy. Still, long vacancies on the U.S. Supreme Court were common enough in the 1800s but have not been common in modern history; since 1970, the average court vacancy hasn’t lasted even a full 60 days.

McConnell & Co. certainly violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the Constitution, which grants the sitting (not the next) U.S. president the right to nominate a new Supreme Court justice/“justice,” and it’s sad that unless basic fucking decency is expressed explicitly in writing, craven traitors will subvert democracy to get their own way.

**I can only think of the current court as “the (5-4) Gorsuch Court” — because it contains an illegitimate “justice” named Neil Gorsuch, whose very presence on the court taints every court decision in which he participates.

I adamantly refuse to give the dint of legitimacy to those who are illegitimate, such as “President” George W. Bush, “President” Pussygrabber and “Justice” Gorsuch. You don’t reward the blatant theft of political power by doing anything to give it the air of legitimacy.

Nate Silver, Matthew Yglesias: 2020 Dem front-runner is Bernie Sanders

I wholeheartedly agree with Salon.com writer D. Watkins that the United States of America “is on pause.” 

He wrote recently:

Donald Trump supporters made their big cultural statement in 2016 by electing to the presidency a white-collar executive who’s never seen a day of hard work yet presents himself as the champion of blue-collar people. Now, as a result, America is on pause.

We have now been under the rule of Donald Trump for more than 170 days and nothing of substance has happened — other than multiple attempts to undo everything that had been accomplished by the previous administration, like Barack Obama’s special immigration program for foreign entrepreneurs, providing heating aid for some of our most vulnerable citizens, the defrosting of relations with Cuba and, of course, the GOP’s constant obsession — Obamacare.

Anything Obama touched in his eight years in office, from Planned Parenthood to climate change, has to go, apparently. What’s worse, many of these Obama undos are being under-reported overall, because Trump’s crass tweets and his campaign’s collection of Russia scandals makes for better TV. …

Agreed that while we’re all focused on Russia and “President” Pussygrabber’s latest outrageous tweet, the unelected Pussygrabber regime is dismantling everything good and, like a virus, is altering the main function of the federal government to that of making the rich even richer and the poor even poorer.

But it’s not like Obama was a progressive champion; he was not. He was a moderate, a centrist who far preferred working with the status quo than trying anything even remotely approaching radically progressive. Even his “signature” “achievement,” Obamacare, kept health care a for-profit enterprise (indeed, if you didn’t buy health insurance, you were — well, are — penalized).

As I have noted many times, Obama had an opportunity, in 2009 and 2010, when he still had a shitload of political capital behind him and before the House of Representatives reverted to the Repugnicans in November 2010, to push through a boldly progressive agenda. But he spectacularly squandered that one and only opportunity during his eight years in the White House.

I am happy that toward the end of his time in office Obama moved to open relations between the United States and Cuba — with the caveat that I really, really hope that Cuba doesn’t become the capitalist playground that capitalist exploiters had made it before the Castro revolution — but all in all, the Obama years were eight years that were mostly squandered, and after the eight disastrous years under “President” George W. Bush (and the many disastrous years before his, going back at least to Ronald Reagan), we couldn’t afford to squander yet another eight years.

And we can’t afford to squander these years that we are squandering under Pussygrabber (and under Mike Pence, if he ends up completing Pussygrabber’s term) — and it’s much worse than squandering, actually. To squander something is to fail to take good advantage of it; again, what Pussygrabber & Co. are doing now is dismantling everything that doesn’t immediately profit themselves and their super-rich cronies and converting it into a profiteering machine for themselves.

Enter, methinks, Bernie Sanders.

The Democratic Party establishment has shown little leadership during the Pussygrabber regime thus far because the establishment Democrats are funded by many if not most of the very same corporations that fund the Repugnicans. And these corporate funders are paying for an extension of the sociopoliticoeconomic status quo (which is the most that they will allow).

The Democratic establishment will try to front an Obama-esque fresh face for 2020, will try to punk us again. It could be corporate whore Cory Booker or it could be newbie Kamala Harris, who has been in the U.S. Senate for such a short period of time that I have to wonder if she has had time to discover where the women’s restroom is yet.

I voted for Harris, both for California’s U.S. senator to replace the retiring Barbara Boxer and when she was California’s attorney general, but it’s way too soon to be talking about President Harris. Let’s let her accomplish something before we give her that huge promotion.

True, Obama was in the U.S. Senate for only four years — not even for one full (six-year) term — before he ran for president, but that’s my point; we don’t need, in Kamala Harris, a female Barack Obama (who hadn’t accomplished anything in the Senate before he became president).

We need a bold progressive.

Thus far, for 2020 I’m staunchly supporting Bernie Sanders. Vox.com’s Matthew Yglesias wrote earlier this month (emphasis in bold is mine):

Amid a swirl of speculation about Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker, and practically everyone else under the sun as potential Democratic presidential contenders, most of the political class is ignoring the elephant in the room.

Bernie Sanders is, by some measures the most popular politician in America, by far Democrats’ most in-demand public speaker, and the most prolific grassroots fundraiser in American history.

If he were 10 or 20 years younger, his absence from a 2020 cattle call held by the Center for American Progress back in May would have been glaring. As things stood, the whisper among everyone in the halls was simply that he’s too old and obviously won’t run.

But make no mistake: Sanders is the real 2020 Democratic front-runner.

He’s doing exactly what a candidate who fell short needs to do to run a second time. He’s established a national political organization, he’s improved his ties with colleagues on Capitol Hill, he’s maintained a heavy presence in national media, and he’s traveling the country talking about issues.

In subtle ways he’s shifted his policy commitments to the center, making himself a more broadly acceptable figure in the party. At the same time, he’s held on to a couple of signature issues — Medicare-for-all and tuition-free public college — that give him exactly the kind of clear-cut and broadly accessible agenda that mainstream Democrats lack.

Of course, if he were to run and win, he’d be 78 years old, the oldest president on record by some margin. And maybe he won’t run. But his recent moves suggest that he is both interested in the nomination and very much the candidate to beat for it. …

Yup. It’s fine if the Democratic establishment wishes to ignore Bernie (who, I surmise, hasn’t moved to the center nearly as much as he has moved the center point further to his side). We, the people, are the ones who will participate in the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primary elections and caucuses. And it will be significantly harder for the Democratic National Committee to fuck over Bernie this time because we’re all well aware of how the Billarybots of the DNC fucked Bernie over last time.

Will the voters who were stoked over Bernie in 2016 — he won 46 percent of the pledged delegates (the delegates that actually had to be democratically won in the primary elections and the caucuses) to Billary’s paltry-for-her 54 percent — accept an Obama-esque empty shell like Cory Booker, all lame political platitudes but nothing to back them up?

I don’t think that they’ll be punk’d like that again.

Yes, it’s possible that Bernie won’t run in 2020, but he has been pretty active for someone who has ruled out a 2020 run. As I noted in April:

Bernie Sanders is, I think, going to run for the presidency again in 2020.

He hasn’t ruled it out, and he has remained in the public eye since the preventably disastrous November 2016 presidential election.

He put a book out in November (and his progressive comrade Elizabeth Warren has another book due out later this month), and while the establishment Democrats’ “plan” remains to just sit back and watch the Repugnican Tea Party, under the “leadership” of “President” Pussygrabber, implode (or explode, I suppose), Bernie is out there advocating for a progressive agenda that would improve millions of lives (as is Elizabeth).

Bernie will introduce legislation for single-payer health care, totally bypassing the bogus argument of corporate-friendly Obamacare vs. corporate-friendly Trumpcare (and necessarily so), and he and Warren have introduced legislation for free in-state community college and public four-year college tuition. …

Matthew Yglesias’ piece inspired Nate Silver and crew over at fivethirtyeight.com to weigh in on whether or not Bernie is actually the 2020 Democratic Party presidential front-runner.

In the rather meandering discussion, Silver (whose opinion at fivethirtyeight.com that I value the most) proclaims, “I say YES.”

Silver qualifies: “A ‘front-runner’ is the horse that jumps out to the front of the pack and dictates the action behind him.” He adds: “Bernie got 13 million votes in 2016. Isn’t he next in line for the Democratic nomination?”

Um, yes, he garnered 13.2 million popular votes to Billary’s 16.9 million, and he won 22 states, plus the Democrats abroad.

That would, if the Democratic Party establishment still weren’t anti-democratic, pro-corporate and anti-populist and corrupt, of course mean that he’s next in line.

As I’ve noted before, I can support Elizabeth Warren if Bernie doesn’t run again, but I prefer Bernie to her for 2020 for several reasons.

Not only are his favorability numbers among all American voters significantly higher than are hers, so it would be much less of an uphill battle for him than it would be for her, but he has run a presidential campaign already and thus has a lot of infrastructure and supporters already in place. Warren, of course, does not.

And on that note, while Warren declined to run in 2016 — I still surmise that she was too cowardly to step on Queen Billary’s royal cape — Bernie went ahead and ran against Billary instead of allowing her to coast to a coronation, as did all of the cowards who comprise the Democratic Party establishment.

I admire that Bernie fucking did that. It showed leadership and it showed gigantic balls. He knew what he was up against — the corrupt, anti-democratic and anti-Democratic Billary juggernaut — but he did it anyway.

And in the admittedly very early polls of 2020 Democratic Party presidential preference, Bernie is leading, inspiring Nate Silver to proclaim, “Sanders is really well liked among Democrats. He was second last time. He’s leading in the polls now. Isn’t it obvious that he’s the front-runner?”

To me it is. And I’m in good company with Silver and Yglesias.

Will his age (75) harm Bernie? I don’t think so. As long as he remains active and alert on the campaign trail, as he did in 2015 and 2016, he should be fine. U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California is 84 years old and is expected to run for re-election in 2018 — and is expected win handily (unfortunately; she really needs to go). And to me she has shown a lot more signs of advanced age than has Bernie, including mental fogginess.

Feinstein is the oldest member of the U.S. Senate, followed by six other current senators who are at least 80 years old, including the fossil John McCainosaurus.

So no, age isn’t necessarily a campaign killer.

Will the drummed-up “scandal” regarding Bernie’s wife and the funding of Burlington College — a “scandal” drummed up by “President” Pussygrabber’s campaign chairman for Vermont — be a problem for Bernie?

No.

Only those who never would have supported democratic socialist Bernie anyway will give the “scandal” any credence, and at any rate, the “scandal” doesn’t involve Bernie (he hasn’t been shown to have done anything illegal or even unethical), and anyone with two brain cells to rub together will consider the source: “President” Pussygrabber’s campaign chairman for Vermont.

Um, yeah. It’s an obvious smear campaign, and I might argue that the smear campaign is a good sign, because you don’t smear those who are weak, but those who pose a threat.

The 2020 cycle is better for Bernie than was 2016 in many ways. Queen Billary is out of the picture (finally), and in the wake of Billary’s loss in November 2016, the brand of “Democratic” Party that the center-right, sellout Clintons started and that Obama perpetuated is weakened.

As I’ve noted before, not only did Bernie win 46 percent of the pledged delegates to Billary’s 54 percent, but in February we saw that familiar 46-54 split in the election of the new chair of the Democratic National Committee, with Clinton-Obama establishmentarian Democrat (“Democrat”?) Tom Perez garnering 54 percent of the vote to Bernie-backed progressive Keith Ellison’s 46 percent.

We progressives — we true Democrats — are within striking distance of taking over the party. It’s clear that the “Democratic” Party establishment under Perez, et. al. still doesn’t have a clue or a plan (other than, as I noted in April, watching the “Pussygrabber” regime destroy itself).

Not being Pussygrabber won’t be enough for the Dems in 2018 or in 2020.

And had Bernie become president in November 2016, he probably would have faced a Repugnican-controlled Senate and a Repugnican-controlled House in January 2017. He would have been able to get nothing done, very most likely, and this Repugnican obstructionism unfairly and untruthfully would have been attributed to the inherent failure of his brand of politics.

Bernie’s chance of having at least one of the two houses of Congress controlled by the Democrats in January 2021 is pretty good, given that colossal failure “President” Pussygrabber in most polls can’t maintain an approval rating of even 40 percent, and if both houses were controlled by the Dems in 2021 under a President Sanders, you can be sure that President Sanders wouldn’t waste his political capital trying to hold hands and sing “Kumbaya” with the treasonous Repugnicans in Congress, as President Obama incredibly stupidly did in 2009 and 2010, when both houses of Congress last were held by the Dems.

We indeed are a nation on pause — at best — and to make up for that lost precious time, we need someone who is boldly progressive, someone who very actively will make up for that lost time by pushing through a sane, unabashedly progressive agenda — someone who will do what Obama failed to do in 2009 and in 2010 — and that someone is Bernie Sanders.

P.S. Matthew Yglesias mentioned Joe Biden and Kirsten Gillibrand as potential 2020 presidential candidates.

Yeah, um, no way in hell can I support has-been Joe Biden, who is too aligned with the Clinton-Obama brand of the party. Plus, if he were so fucking popular, why didn’t Biden become president by now? (Or at least the Democratic Party presidential candidate in a general presidential election by now?)

And Gillibrand — what is her appeal, other than her XX chromosomes? I have nothing particularly against her, as for the most part I know very little about her, but what’s so special about her, other than that she was elected to Billary’s U.S. Senate seat for New York after Billary became Obama’s secretary of state? Is she supposed to be Billary’s mini-me? (That was rhetorical, but the answer is yes.)

Biden, Gillibrand, Booker, Harris — all are candidates for those who have no vision and no imagination, but who think that the bullshit of the past is going to work in the future. They have learned nothing from Billary’s failure in November.

P.P.S. I just saw this on Slate.com:

A Bloomberg poll released [today] shows that eight months after November’s election and nearly half a year into the new administration, Hillary Clinton is a touch less popular than Donald Trump. From Bloomberg:

Trump’s 2016 Democratic rival is viewed favorably by just 39 percent of Americans in the latest Bloomberg National Poll, two points lower than the president. It’s the second-lowest score for Clinton since the poll started tracking her in September 2009.

The former secretary of state has always been a polarizing figure, but this survey shows she’s even lost popularity among those who voted for her in November.

According to Bloomberg, more than a fifth of Clinton voters now say they view her unfavorably compared with only 8 percent of likely Clinton voters saying the same in Bloomberg’s last poll before the election.

Bloomberg’s John McCormick writes that interviews with some of those polled suggest that the decline has less to do with Clinton losing than it does with the Democratic Party’s identity crisis.

“Many said they wished Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont had won the Democratic nomination,” he writes, “or that they never liked Clinton and only voted for her because she was the lesser of two bad choices.” [Emphasis mine.]

This is (more) vindication, not only of the fact that even those who voted for Billary in November didn’t like her, but also of the fact that it was a colossal fuck-up for the Dems to have allowed Billary & Co. to steal the nomination from the much more popular and much more liked Bernie.

It is also more evidence of the fact that Clintonism is done and that we can stick a big ol’ fork in it.

(Lest you think that the Bloomberg poll is wrong, know that the Huffington Post’s Pollster [a poll aggregator] right now has Billary’s favorability rating at only 40.3 percent — which is very close to the 40.1 percent approval rating that HuffPo Pollster now gives Pussygrabber.

Pussygrabber and Billary both are despised now just like they were on Election Day in November, while HuffPo Pollster puts Bernie Sanders’ favorability rating at 57 percent.

Hindsight indeed is 2020.)

 

E-mails, schme-mails: Billary Clinton very probably still has it in the bag

Associated Press photo

Presidential candidate Billary Clinton, shown above yesterday in Des Moines, Iowa, has claimed that FBI director James Comey’s late-October surprise of yet even more e-mails that the FBI intends to investigate will show nothing new. Comey, a lifelong Repugnican operative whom President Barack Obama never should have nominated to the post of FBI chief, very apparently is trying to influence the presidential election that is only 10 days away, since he violated U.S. Department of Justice policy prohibiting publicly discussing an ongoing investigation in order to deliver his late-October surprise. Still, I expect Billary to win on November 8, regardless of this latest example of a Repugnican operative trying to rig yet another election.

The presidential race is tightening a little bit — as probably could be expected as Election Day nears (it’s 10 days from today) and thus voters finally pay more attention and thus the “choice” between Der Fuhrer Donald Trump and Queen Billary Clinton of the Clinton Dynasty becomes more real to them — but I still expect Billary to win.

If the damned e-mails from her days as U.S. secretary of state haven’t brought Billary down by now, I don’t really see them bringing her down between today and Election Day, especially when we don’t even know what, if anything, this new batch of e-mails contains and probably won’t before Election Day.

(This late-October surprise, by the way, comes from FBI director James Comey, a Repugnican operative who never should have been appointed in the first fucking place by President Barack Obama, who very apparently has thought it cute and even Lincolnesque to put Repugnicans in position of power, which is yet another reason why I couldn’t vote for DINO Obama again in 2012 and why the Democratic Party, which excels only at selling us commoners out to the Repugnican Tea Party, disgusts me in general.)

I’m not saying that Billary isn’t scandalous — she’s a Clinton, so by definition she’s a scandal magnet, attracting both legitimate scandals and pseudo-scandals cooked up by the vast right-wing conspiracy — but as political scandals go in the United States of America, this e-mail stuff is pretty much nothing compared to Trump’s too-recent proclamation that he believes in grabbing women by the pussy.

Anyway, fivethirtyeight.com right now puts Trump’s chances of winning the election from 19.3 percent to 21.5 percent. One out of five is bad.

Both Billary and El Trumpo are disliked by more Americans than they are liked, but The Great Orange One is disliked significantly more than is Billary. His favorability rating is at a stunningly low 36 percent and his unfavorability rating is at a shockingly high 62 percent, while Billary’s favorability is at 44 percent and her unfavorability is at 54 percent. She’s in the hole by 10 percentage points, while Trump is in the hole by 26 percentage points.

I don’t see a presidential candidate who is disliked by almost two-thirds of the electorate making it to the White House, and I still don’t see the American people, as dumb as they have demonstrated that they can be, putting into the Oval Office, for the first time in my lifetime of almost five decades, the first president who had not first been at least the governor of a state, a U.S. senator or the vice president of the United States (but instead had been a bankrupt-happy billionaire and a “reality” TV show star).

Of course Trump could become president. His chances are around one in five, not zero, and we do have precedent in George W. Bush, who lost the presidential election but who was installed by a right-wing U.S. Supreme Court into the White House anyway. (And not just to blame the Supreme Court; the American people should have taken the blatantly stolen presidential election of 2000 to the streets with torches and pitchforks, but they did not.)

Still, if I had to bet a large sum of money on Der Fuhrer Trump or Queen Billary, I’d put my money on Billary, and the prediction markets are with me on this. PredictIt.org, for example, right now has 72 cents to 75 cents on Billary and only 28 cents on Trump. (With PredictIt, each cent represents one percentage point of probability.)

As I’ve already noted, I’ve already voted for Green Party candidate Jill Stein on my vote-by-mail ballot that I already mailed in, as Billary is going to win my state of California and all of its 55 electoral votes no matter fucking what.

I certainly don’t regret my vote, as we continue to learn more and more, from leaked e-mails, that numerous Billary operatives (from within and from without the Democratic National Committee) did their best to try to harm Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, even discussing the possibility of releasing a shirtless picture of him, for fuck’s sake. (The picture, by the way, is absolutely no big deal, but teeny-tiny minds have only teeny-tiny thoughts, and when your candidate is loathed by the American people second only to Donald Trump, you get awfully desperate, I suppose.)

The piece-of-shit Clintonistas only demonstrate even further how deplorable they are when they’d rather that we rabble focus on Russia (in a pathetic, right-wing Cold War 2.0 mindset) instead of on the content of the leaked e-mails that expose them for the anti-democratic, DINO weasels that they are.

I and millions of others are much more interested in the content of leaked e-mails — especially e-mails that show malfeasance — than we are in who exactly leaked them and whether the uber-secretive elites whose many secrets treasonously harm the masses deem these leaks to be legal or not. (And that the Billarybots actually believe that their lame-ass attempted Jedi mindfucks — Oh, look! Russia! — actually will work on all of us demonstrates how condescending and out of touch they are.)

I’ll never get over how Team Clinton treated Bernie Sanders — I will not forgive nor will I forget — and given her character, I just can’t defend Repugnican Lite Billary when the vast right-wing conspiracy relentlessly goes after her during what probably will be just one, very ugly term in the White House.

Not only does pretty much everything bad that happens to Billary appear to be her karmic return, but she never actually has had my back (but has only pandered to certain groups for money and for votes), and so I am utterly unable to have hers.

I can eke out one kind-of nice comment about Billary, though: I am glad that we most likely will have our first female president in January. That historical development is long, long overdue.

That said, it’s too, too bad that it’s Billary Clinton — and not someone like Elizabeth Warren or Jill Stein — who is making that history.*

P.S. Fivethirtyeight.com’s Nate Silver notes of this latest development:

… The risk is that by continuing to litigate the [e-mail] case, Clinton could keep the story in the news, which could be a negative for her even if further details prove to be exculpatory. At this point in the election, it’s mostly so-called low-information voters who are still making up their minds — not necessarily those who will read the fine print. [Emphasis mine.] And in general this year, candidates have tended to lose ground in the polls whenever they’ve been in the headlines. A day that the media spends talking about Comey and e-mails is also a day that they don’t spend talking about Trump and his many vulnerabilities. …

How many low-info voters (that is, abject dumbfucks) — whose last-minute decision between Billary and Der Fuhrer Donald could defy the polls giving Billary the victory — remain? Well, just four days ago, Silver wrote:

… About 15 percent of the electorate isn’t yet committed to Clinton or Trump, as compared to just 5 percent who weren’t committed to President Obama or Mitt Romney at this point in 2012. That’s one of the reasons why our models still give Trump an outside chance at victory. In theory, with Clinton at “only” 46 percent of the vote, he could beat her by winning almost all of the undecided and third-party voters. (In practice, there’s no particular indication that these voters have Trump as their second choice.)

These undecideds, however, aren’t distributed evenly across the various states. Florida and North Carolina have relatively few of them, for example, while New Hampshire and Colorado have more. This could affect each campaign’s strategy over the final few weeks: In states with few undecideds, it’s mostly a matter of turning out your vote; in states with more of them, voters may still be open to persuasion. …

Again, my best educated guess is that Trump has only a one-in-five — maybe as much as a one-in-four — chance of winning, but leave it to the low-info voters to give us, at the last minute, President Trump (and a Nazi Germany 2.0), to at least make the election close enough for Team Trump to try to steal it, a la Team Bush in 2000.

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*That said, the thought that Sarah Palin might actually become president in the case of John McCainosaurus’ death — yeah, yes, of course, a President Billary is another Abraham Fucking Lincoln compared to how a President Palin would have turned out.

Ready panic button, says Nate Silver

Yikes. Yikes. Yikes.

Fivethirtyeight.com right now puts Der Fuhrer Donald Trump’s chances of winning the White House at 40.0 percent to Billary’s 60.0 percent.

I’ll start panicking when Trump’s chances are in the 40s, I told myself when they were in the 30s.

Indeed, fivethirtyeight.com founder Nate Silver today posted a piece titled “Democrats Should Panic … If the Polls Still Look Like This in a Week.”

He begins his piece (links are Silver’s):

Hillary Clinton’s lead in the polls has been declining for several weeks, and now we’re at the point where it’s not much of a lead at all. National polls show Clinton only 1 or 2 percentage points ahead of Donald Trump, on average. And the state polling situation isn’t really any better for her. [Yesterday] alone, polls were released showing Clinton behind in Ohio, Iowa and Colorado — and with narrow, 3-point leads in Michigan and Virginia, two states once thought to be relatively safe for her.

It’s also become clearer that Clinton’s “bad weekend” — which included describing half of Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables” [last] Friday, and a health scare (followed by news that she had been diagnosed with pneumonia) on Sunday — has affected the polls. Prior to the weekend, Clinton’s decline had appeared to be leveling off, with the race settling into a Clinton lead of 3 or 4 percentage points. But over the past seven days, Clinton’s win probability has declined from 70 percent to 60 percent in our polls-only forecast and by a similar amount, from 68 percent to 59 percent, in our polls-plus forecast.

That’s not to imply the events of the weekend were necessarily catastrophic for Clinton: In the grand scheme of things, they might not matter all that much (although polling from YouGov suggests that Clinton’s health is in fact a concern to voters). …

Silver concludes his piece:

… So it’s plausible that Clinton’s “bad weekend” could be one of those events that has a relatively short-lived impact on the campaign.

As if to put to the question to the test, Trump upended the news cycle [today] by relitigating the conspiracy theory that [President Barack] Obama wasn’t born in the United States. (Trump finally acknowledged that Obama was born here, but only after falsely accusing Clinton of having started the “birther” rumors.)

If voters were reacting to the halo of negative coverage surrounding Clinton rather than to the substance of reporting about Clinton’s health or her “deplorables” comments, she could regain ground as Trump endures a few tough news cycles of his own. Over the course of the general election so far, whichever candidate has been the dominant subject in the news has tended to lose ground in the polls, according to an analysis by Larry Sabato, Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley.

All of this is tricky, though, because we still don’t have a great sense for where the long-term equilibrium of the race is, or even whether there’s an equilibrium at all — and we probably never will because of the unusual nature of Trump’s candidacy. Perhaps Trump isn’t that different from a “generic Republican” after all. Or perhaps (more plausibly in my view) he is very poor candidate who costs the Republicans substantially, but that Clinton is nearly as bad a candidate and mostly offsets this effect.

Still, I’d advise waiting a week or so to see whether Clinton’s current dip in the polls sticks as the news moves on from her “bad weekend” to other subjects.

Indeed, it was a bad move by Team Trump to remind us today that yes, Barack Obama indeed is a U.S. citizen — and by so doing remind us that not long ago enough he infamously very publicly had questioned that fact, which no sane individual has doubted.

I don’t see Billary’s “basket of deplorables” remark hurting her in the long term. One, it’s just a fucking fact — indeed, far more than half of Der Fuhrer Trump’s goose-stepping supporters belong in that handbasket that’s headed for hell — and two, it’s not like anyone in that handbasket to hell ever was going to vote for Billary anyway.

No, it was the pneumonia diagnosis (last Friday) and the delayed announcement of it (on Sunday), methinks, that hurt Billary more. Indeed, apparently Billary’s surrogates (and they are Legion) tripped over each other to lie that she’d simply “overheated” in New York City on Sunday, when the high temperature there was only around 85 degrees that day — only then to have the truth of the matter (the pneumonia diagnosis of two days earlier) come out only hours later.

But luckily for Billary, this is the United States of Amnesia, and, again, The Donald just reminded us today that he once strongly had asserted over a long period of time that Barack Obama wasn’t born on U.S. soil.

So yeah, right now we’re seeing, I suspect — I hope — the delayed-in-the-polls reaction to Pneumoniagate, but this, too, shall pass, methinks, and then we’ll be back to where we were pre-Pneumoniagate, which is a highly polarized electorate that’s not going to be swayed very much by very much. (Indeed, El Trumpo very apparently feels quite confident that reminding the nation of his “birtherism” won’t cause him any political damage, and among his brain-damaged supporters, it won’t.)

But I’m still going to take Nate Silver’s advice; if Trump remains at or above a 40-percent chance of winning the White House between now and Election Day, I’m going to wear out the panic button.

Again: This “man” must never be president.

Der Fuhrer Donald Trump is now too close to Queen Billary for my comfort

Prognosticator god Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com right now puts Donald Trump’s chances of winning the White House at almost one in three. Yikes. If Trump’s chances grow, I’ll be forced to decide whether or not to give Billary Clinton’s campaign money in order to try to prevent the fascist demagogue Trump from becoming president. (Yes, it would have to be that bad for me to give Democrat in name only Billary a fucking penny.)

The presidential election is two months from today, and as I type this sentence fivethirtyeight.com gives Donald Trump a 31.2 percent chance of becoming the next occupant of the White House to Billary Clinton’s 68.8 percent chance.

That’s about a one-in-three chance for El Trumpo, which is still too close for comfort for me.

In the nationwide polling, Billary leads Trump by only 2.1 percent when Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein are included in the polling, per Real Clear Politics’ average of nationwide polls right now. (When it’s only Trump and Billary, Billary doesn’t do much better, per RCP; she beats Trump by only 2.8 percent in a two-way race. The Huffington Post’s average of nationwide polls right now puts Billary at 5.1 percentage points ahead of Trump in a two-way race. HuffPo doesn’t do an explicit four-way race like RCP does, but when HuffPo includes Johnson and all other candidates, Billary is at 4.8 percentage points ahead of Trump.)

How can fivethirtyeight.com give Billary a bit more than a two-thirds chance of winning the White House when nationwide she’s polling no more than around two to five percentage points ahead of Trump? That would be due to the states where she’s leading and how many electoral votes they have. Right now fivethirtyeight.com projects that Billary is likely to win more than 300 electoral votes (she or Trump needs 270 electoral votes to win the White House).

Fivethirtyeight.com right now gives Billary a 99.6 percent chance of winning my state of California — and thus all 55 of its electoral votes, which is more than any other state’s — so it will be quite safe for me to vote my conscience and thus to vote for Jill Stein.

I encourage you to mosey on over to fivethirtyeight.com and see where your state stands. (Just hover your cursor over your state on the graphic of the U.S. map.)

If the probability between Trump and Billary is too close for comfort in your state and you want to prevent a President Trump by voting for Billary, I can’t be mad at you for that, but if, like I do, you live in a solidly blue or solidly red state where it’s pretty fucking foreordained that Billary or Trump is going to win the state — say, by more than a 75 percent or 80 percent chance — and you don’t want to vote for Billary or for Trump, then I encourage you not to.

Take Texas, for instance. Fivethirtyeight.com right now gives Trump a 91.6 percent chance of winning Texas. Sure, you could vote for Billary if you’re a Texan voter, but she’s not going to win Texas and thus she won’t win any of its electoral votes in the winner-takes-all Electoral College system, so you might as well vote for another candidate if you don’t want to vote for Billary or for Trump. You might as well cast a protest vote, as I am doing.

Like California, Billary is going to win New York; fivethirtyeight.com puts that at a 98.6 percent chance. If you’re a New York resident who doesn’t want to vote for Billary, then don’t. She’s going to win your state and all of its electoral votes anyway. Go ahead and make that protest vote; you’re quite safe in doing so.

Take a look at fivethirtyeight.com’s list of the 10 states that are most likely to be the tipping point in the Electoral College. They are, in this order of likelihood, from greater to lesser: Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Virginia, Colorado, Minnesota and Nevada.

It all comes down to which candidate reaches 270 electoral votes (270 is the majority of the total of 538 electoral votes possible, from where Nate Silver’s website fivethirtyeight.com takes its name), so if you live and vote in a state that actually could make a difference in the outcome of the presidential election, such as Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Virginia, Colorado, Minnesota or Nevada, then by all means hold your nose and vote for Billary.

I am not voting for Billary for several reasons. Among them, in no certain order, are that, again, she’s going to win California and its 55 electoral votes whether I vote for her not; I don’t like her or trust her (I don’t for a nanosecond believe that she cares about anyone other than herself and her cronies [I’ve always seen her pandering for what it is: pandering], and she changes her political positions like a human weather vane on crack); she is center-right and Repugnican Lite (indeed, the Dallas Morning News, which hadn’t endorsed a Democratic presidential candidate since before World War II, recently endorsed Billary); as a U.S. senator she voted for the unelected Bush regime’s illegal, immoral, unjust and unprovoked Vietraq War and had no notable legislative accomplishments during her eight carpet-bagging years in the U.S. Senate; on that note, she used her surname and her status as former first lady to ascend first to the Senate, then to U.S. secretary of state, and then to the 2016 Democratic Party presidential nomination (feminism hardly is about cravenly simply riding your hubby’s coattails); and, last but certainly not least, WikiLeaks in the latter half of July released e-mails proving that top officials within the Democratic National Committee, including former DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz, were in the bag for Democrat in name only Billary and sought to sabotage and tank the presidential campaign of the ironically actually Democratic Bernie Sanders from Day One, as we already had figured. (As I’ve noted, that was the final fucking straw for me, and after California’s June 7 presidential primary election and the WikiLeaks revelation, I switched my registration from the Democratic Party back to the Green Party. Fuck the corrupt, anti-democratic Democratic Party!)

I am not alone in disliking Billary Clinton; per Huffington Post’s roundup of favorability polls, 55.5 percent of Americans don’t like Billary and only 41.3 percent do like her. Her numbers aren’t much better than Trump’s; per HuffPo’s roundup of favorability polls, 58.1 percent of Americans don’t like Trump and only 37.9 percent do.

It’s funny (pathetic funny, not ha-ha funny), because it doesn’t matter which candidate wins; he or she most likely will start off on Inauguration Day disliked by a majority of the American people.

Our “choice” in this presidential election is bullshit, and that fact contributes to why I’m voting for Jill Stein, even if it amounts to a protest vote.

I wrote “our ‘choice,'” in the preceding paragraph, but we, the American people, should have choices, not just the choice between only two candidates. Voting for a third-party or independent presidential candidate is a way to say Oh, hell no! to the partisan duopoly of the Coke Party and the Pepsi Party (can’t tell the difference between the two? Yeah, most of the rest of us can’t, either), which has devolved to our “choice” of Billary Clinton or Donald Trump.*

That said, when push comes to shove, yes, of course, Donald Trump is the greater evil, and I’m closely watching fivethirtyeight.com’s probability of Trump winning the White House, which is updated at least daily.

As I noted, even a 31.2 percent chance of Trump becoming president (where it stands right now) is too close for my comfort, but I’m not sure at which point (if at any point) I’d give Billary any money to help her defeat Trump. I’ve yet to give her a penny, as I don’t want her to be president, but I want Trump to be president even less.

Trump strikes me as a dangerous demagogue whose fascist presidency could bring harm to millions of people here at home and abroad, and should he actually win the White House and I had done nothing at all to try to prevent that, I probably would regret it.

(The only thing that I really could do to help prevent a President Trump, given the restrictions on my free time and energy [and given the fact that no, I won’t make phone calls to voters in other states, as I hate receiving political phone calls myself], is to give Billary money; she doesn’t need my vote, since she essentially has won my state already.)

So I’m hoping that Trump doesn’t creep up in fivethirtyeight.com’s presidential probability report, such as to, say, more than 40 percent, because I’ve been happy that I haven’t given Billary a penny, and I don’t want that happiness to end.

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*Indeed, the third-party candidates are polling better this presidential election cycle than they have in a long time. Per Real Clear Politics’ averages of recent nationwide polls in a four-way presidential race, the Libertarians’ Gary Johnson right now has 9 percent and the Green’s Jill Stein has 3.3 percent.

Independent presidential candidate Ross Perot won almost 19 percent of the popular vote in the 1992 election. I still maintain that Perot, being right of center, siphoned more votes from incumbent George H. W. Bush than from Bill Clinton, and that thus if it weren’t for Perot, Bill Clinton probably wouldn’t have won the presidency in 1992.

Bill Clinton first won the White House only on a plurality, by the way — he won only 43 percent of the popular vote in the 1992 three-way presidential race.

Billary Clinton isn’t doing even that well in RCP’s averages of recent nationwide polls in a four-way presidential race: She garners only 41.2 percent to Trump’s 39.1 percent (and again, in that four-way race Gary Johnson garners 9 percent and Jill Stein garners 3.3 percent).

Johnson, I surmise, is siphoning more votes from Trump than from Billary — the Libertarians (and Perot was Libertarian-ish) aren’t centrist but are right of center — but, I surmise, not to the point that Ross Perot siphoned votes from George H. W. Bush.

If Billary wins the White House, she most likely won’t do it with even 50.0 percent of the popular vote, and she’ll be weak from Day One.

P.S. In my lifetime of almost five decades, only two presidents won the White House on only a plurality: Richard Nixon in 1968 and Bill Clinton in 1992. Bill Clinton’s re-election in 1996 also was only a plurality (although a stronger one than in 1992), by the way.

P.P.S. Politico lists the “battleground states” as Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.

That list of 11 states mostly coincides with fivethirtyeight.com’s list of “tipping-point” states above.

For the most part, I’d say that if your state appears on either list (most of the states cited appear on both lists), you probably strongly should consider voting for Billary (while holding your nose after having taken an anti-emetic, if necessary) in order to block Trump.

I’m not voting for Billary because my not voting for her won’t help Trump at all. (If you actually believe that the U.S. president is chosen by the popular vote, please educate yourself on the Electoral College.)

And I still maintain that Bernie Sanders was the stronger of the two Democratic candidates to go up against Trump, and that the Democratic Party made a big fucking mistake by making Billary its nominee.

Of course, I don’t blame the primary voters and caucus-goers entirely for that; there was, after all, a lot of corruption within the calcified, obsolete Democratic National Committee to ensure that Billary won the pageant.

Bernie and Billary agree to four more debates, including one before N.H.

Reuters photo

Billary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are pictured at the Democratic Party presidential debate earlier this month in South Carolina. The two front-runners have agreed to four additional debates, one wedged between the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary and three more after the New Hampshire primary.

Politico reports today that Bernie Sanders and Billary Clinton have agreed to four more debates, which would bring the total number of 2016 Democratic Party presidential debates to 10.

The Democratic National Committee (that is, Debbie Wasserman Schultz) would have to approve the additional debates, however.

The first proposed new debate would be sandwiched between the Iowa caucuses on Monday and the New Hampshire primary on February 9. This additional debate would help Billary, especially if Bernie wins Iowa — something that Nate Silver says is more unlikely than likely to happen yet still is quite possible, given that the two have been neck and neck in Iowa recently but that Billary is up around four points right now and has the support of the establishment, yet if Bernie can get his more-enthusiastic-but-younger supporters to turn out, that could win it for him.

(Right now Real Clear Politics’ average of Iowa polls has Billary at 3.4 percent ahead of Bernie, while the Huffington Post’s average of Iowa polls has Billary up over Bernie at 4 percent right now.)

Indeed, an additional debate sandwiched between Iowa and New Hampshire would do more good for Billary than it would for Bernie, given that Bernie has been leading Billary in New Hampshire by double digits for some time now. (Right now RCP’s average of New Hampshire polls has Bernie at 14.3 percent ahead of Billary, and HuffPo’s average of New Hampshire polls has Bernie beating Billary there by 13 percent.)

Especially if Bernie wins Iowa, another debate before New Hampshire could, I surmise, harm his chances there. Recall that in 2008, Billary came in at third place in Iowa and then turned on the waterworks and won New Hampshire (because The New Feminism is all about attacking others for their sexist or even supposedly sexist stereotypes — but employing blatantly sexist stereotypes oneself when it benefits oneself).

On the balance, though, the addition of three more debates after New Hampshire should help Bernie, because the Democratic National Committee/Debbie Wasserman Schultz thus far has scheduled only two debates after New Hampshire: on February 11 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and on March 9 in Miami, Florida.

In addition to the debate wedged between Iowa and New Hampshire, the Bernie and Billary camps have agreed to additional debates in March, April and May, Politico reports.

If the 2016 Democratic Party presidential primary season is stretched out, like 2008’s was (recall that Billary didn’t finally concede to Barack Obama until June 2008), the three extra debates after New Hampshire, bringing the total post-New-Hampshire debate total to five, would benefit Bernie.

Indeed, scheduling only two debates after New Hampshire apparently was Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s tactic to expose her precious Billary to as few debates as possible after the earliest-voting states.

So while I’m hoping for the four extra debates — even though live-blogging the debates, as I have been doing, can be a bit of a pain in the ass — I’m not holding my breath that the Democratic National Committee/Debbie Wasserman Schultz will say yes to them.

The process has not been very democratic thus far.

P.S. In other news today, the New York Times quite stupidly has endorsed Billary Clinton for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. (This endorsement comes on the heels of the resurfacing of E-mailgate — news yesterday that Billary’s home-brewed e-mail server contained at least 22 top-secret e-mails. Yeah, it’s really smart to endorse a candidate who might be indicted any day now…)

Can you say “establishment”? The establishmentarian New York Times had endorsed Billary in 2008, too, and we know how well that turned out.

What so many people forget (or ignore) is that the corporately owned and controlled mass media want a corporation-friendly president. Therefore, their endorsements reflect what’s best for them, not what’s best for the majority of the American people.

The Times once again has perceived the most corporation-friendly candidate to be Billary Clinton. Let’s hope that the Times is as right this year as it was in 2008.

Live-blogging the third Dem debate

Reuters photo

Tonight’s third Democratic Party presidential debate resumed for several seconds without Billary Clinton, who hadn’t returned to her center podium on time after a break. Apparently the Force wasn’t with Billary quite enough… Anyway, tonight’s debate may have boosted the on-fire Bernie Sanders a bit, but probably didn’t change the overall dynamics of the race; Bernie and Billary remain the frontrunners, with apparent veep wannabe Martin O’Malley remaining at a distant third.

5:00 p.m. (Pacific Standard Time): The debate starts any moment now. It’s in Manchester, New Hampshire, and is being hosted by ABC News.

5:02 p.m.: Pre-debate chatter has included George Stephanopoulos claiming that the San Bernardino massacre is at the top of the voters’ minds. Really? Is it? Or is that the corporately owned and controlled media trying to tell us commoners what to be concerned about? I mean, they wouldn’t want us to be concerned about, oh, say, income inequality, would they?

Anyway, since Stephanopoulos worked in the Clinton White House, how impartial can he be?

5:08 p.m.: Prognosticator Nate Silver just gave a too-short cameo. He stated that whoever wins the Iowa caucuses on February 1 can expect about a seven-point bounce in the polls. Yup. That’s why I very much hope that Bernie Sanders wins Iowa. He’s already leading in New Hampshire, so a win in Iowa for Sanders no doubt would lead to a win in New Hampshire (on February 9), which probably would result in the collapse of Billary Clinton’s campaign.

5:14 p.m.: The talking heads are blathering about the Repugnicans’ presidential race. WTF? I don’t watch the Repugnican Tea Party presidential debate coverage, as I won’t waste my time on their hate- and lie-fests, but I highly doubt that during the Repugnican Tea Party presidential debate coverage, the Democrats are discussed.

5:26 p.m.: 5:00 p.m. was widely advertised as the start time of this thing, but apparently 5:30 p.m. is the actual start time…

5:31 p.m.: ABC’s live stream keeps freezing on me, so the times of my comments that you see here might be a bit off… The three candidates are on the stage now. Once again, Bernie Sanders is to the left of Billary Clinton’s left as you look at them. I still love that symbolism.

5:33 p.m.: Billary, who wants to be panderer in chief, speaks first. She mentioned ISIS before she mentioned Americans’ socioeconomic well-being. Typical of her.

5:34 p.m.: Martin O’Malley speaks second. He mentioned ISIS first, too. Creep. Democratic leaders lead the debate; they don’t follow the Repugnican Tea Party’s “lead,” don’t let them set the agenda.

5:36 p.m.: Bernie Sanders speaks now. He mentioned the economy first. That’s called leadership. Bernie also has spoken about climate change. He spoke about ISIS and combatting it and terrorism last, which was in order of our national priorities (well, OK, I’d put climate change first).

5:39 p.m.: Of course “Datagate” has come up. Bernie blames the IT vendor for allowing his campaign staff to have seen Clinton campaign data and states that the one staff member who is known to have looked at Clinton campaign data has been fired. (They just cut away to Debbie Wasserman Schultz, whose smug face I would love to wipe off of her head.)

Bernie, although prompted, has apologized to Billary for “Datagate.” She has accepted his apology and states that an independent investigation will be done of “Datagate” (“Datagate” is my word [and The Nation’s], not hers) and that we need to move on. Yes, we do.

(Bernie also has reminded us that during the first debate he “pardoned” [my word, not his] Billary for E-mailgate, and he indicated that he’d like “Datagate” not to consume all of the oxygen in the room, either, as the nation has much larger fish to fry. Yup. Martin O’Malley has concurred.)

5:45 p.m.: Now discussion of ISIS. ISIS is not our greatest issue, so I don’t think that I’m going to play along and regurgitate everything about ISIS here.

5:48 p.m.: O’Malley seems earnest, but he polls in the low single digits. Um, yeah.

Bernie reminds us that he voted against the 2003 Vietraq War, and states that he opposes unilateral American military action. He states that he believes that Muslims in the Middle East should lead the war against ISIS. Yup.

5:50 p.m.: Now gun control. I do agree with Billary on this issue, although it’s a new-found “concern” of hers. Billary states that we need to work with Muslims here in the United States to prevent their “radicalization.” Of course we do. (Of course, we need to work with the “Christo”fascists also to prevent their radicalization, since [9/11 aside] they kill many more Americans than do the “Islamofascists.”)

5:52 p.m.: Bernie reminds us that people do have the constitutional right to own guns. Yup. That said, Bernie says, we need “sensible gun safety regulations.” Yup. We need to strengthen background checks and “eliminate the gun-show loophole,” he says, adding that civilians do not need military-grade weaponry. Yup.

5:54 p.m.: O’Malley is acting like he’s in a Repugnican debate and is refusing to play by the rules of the debate. He’s being allowed to talk over the moderator. He’s being an asshole, acting like a candidate whose polling is trapped in the single digits…

5:56 p.m.: Bernie is adamantly defending himself against O’Malley’s attack. Go, Bernie! We need this in our champion. Bernie reminds us that any change in gun laws needs consensus in Congress. Unfortunately, my live streaming is going in and out now and I’m missing much of this discussion… I apologize for that…

6:01 p.m.: Billary just said that Donald Trump, with his Islamophobic demagoguery, “is becoming ISIS’ best recruiter.” Yup.

Bernie reminds us now that Americans aren’t concerned just about terrorism, but are concerned about their socioeconomic status and their children’s future. Bernie is very animated, talking about how while Donald Trump demagogues that Mexicans and Muslims are our enemy, “the rich get richer.” Yup. And wow. Bernie is on fire!

6:04 p.m.: Moderator Martha Raddatz, whom I’ve always liked (she is firm and stern but fair), just had to check O’Malley, something that the male moderator, whose name I don’t know (he looks like a vapid underwear model who fairly recently became a TV news “talent”) couldn’t do. As I’ve said before, O’Malley seems to be hanging in there only in order to become the vice-presidential candidate.

6:07 p.m.: O’Malley just awkwardly name-dropped the name of an American Muslim friend of his (kind of like saying that you have a black friend or a gay friend) and told a maudlin story about his Muslim American friend’s child asking his father if a President Donald Trump would remove them from their home because they’re Muslim. Jesus fuck, Martin.

6:10 p.m.: The discussion now is on refugees from the Middle East. O’Malley is eager to let us all know that he’s better than his opponents on this issue.

6:11 p.m.: Martha now asks Bernie Sanders why he doesn’t support boots on the ground against ISIS when in the past he has supported boots on the ground against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

The U.S. can’t be the world police, he responds. Bernie says the boots on the ground should be Middle Eastern Muslim boots, not American boots. He slams rich Middle Eastern nations for not doing enough to combat ISIS, but squandering their resources elsewhere, such as on hosting the World Cup. Hell, yeah!

6:15 p.m.: Billary states that ISIS wants American troops back in the Middle East (especially in Iraq in Syria), “Americans soldiers on the ground fighting them,” giving them “a great recruiting opportunity.” Wow. I agree with her on this.

But Martha now follows up, reminding us that the small special operations forces that Billary supports against ISIS in the Middle East could end up like Vietnam, which began with small operations forces there… Billary calls that a “false choice.”

6:18 p.m.: O’Malley is talking. Does it matter? Just keeping it real… Well, OK, he has called ISIS a “genocidal threat,” which is fairly accurate. As I have stated before, I want ISIS vanquished, as I would want any mass-murderous theocrats vanquished, but the U.S. is rotting from within here at home, and we can’t return to the days of the unelected Bush regime in which it was All Terror, All The Time, while things here at home continued to disintegrate.

6:21 p.m.: Bernie reminds us once again that he voted against the Vietraq War in October 2002 while Billary voted for it, and he charges that Billary is too much into “regime change.” He stats that “regime change” too often creates a “political vacuum filled by terrorists,” such as happened in Iraq because of the Vietraq War.

Billary fights back, stating that Bernie voted for regime change in Libya against Moammar Gadhafi.*

6:24 p.m.: The topic now is Libya, on which I’m largely ignorant. Billary now states that she opposes having Iranians in Syria, something I don’t know that Bernie Sanders ever advocated, if that is what she was implying.

“The destruction of ISIS” is our primary concern regarding the Middle East right now, since it was ISIS that struck Paris and apparently inspired the San Bernardino mass murderers, Bernie stated. (Again, there has been zero evidence that there was any actual coordination between ISIS and the San Bernardino mass murderers, so to me the comparison of San Bernardino to Paris is a very, very weak one, usually made by those [treasonous right-wingers, that is] who would love an actual attack on the U.S. by ISIS for political gain, such as how 9/11, which the unelected Bush regime had done precious little to nothing to prevent, was great for the Bush regime to use for political gain. [They were able to use it long enough to at least to “win” “re”-election in November 2004.])

6:27 p.m.: Martin O’Malley just got booed by the audience — quite deservedly so — after stating that he wanted to bring a younger generation’s perspective to the issue of the Middle East. Wow. It was an ageist statement, and perhaps the lowest that he has sunk in these debates thus far.

6:30 p.m.: Whew. Finally, a break.

Thus far I believe that O’Malley has harmed himself by having made an ageist comment and having made an asshole of himself by ignoring the underwear model cum moderator (whose name apparently is David) and talking over him.

I don’t see that either Billary or Bernie can be called the “winner” thus far. That is, if you’re a Clintonista, perhaps even a Billarybot, you’ll say that Billary “won” this debate, and if you are a “Berner,” you’ll say that Bernie “won” it. This pretty much was the same dynamic that we saw in the first two debates.

That said, Bernie has been on fire and has made no flubs or gaffes that I have spotted.

6:37 p.m.: Uh-oh — Billary was late in returning to the stage. They resumed without her. Awkward…

The subject now is the economy. Bernie says that we need “to tell the billionaire class, ‘You cannot have it all.'” He says we need a $15/hour minimum wage, equal pay for women, youth employment, job creation via infrastructure work and tuition-free higher education. Yup.

O’Malley is talking, but he pretty much lost me with his ageist comment. I wish that he would drop out already and stop wasting our time, but I doubt that he will. He really needs a new job, apparently.

6:41 p.m.: Billary states that income inequality is bad for our economy and our democracy. “You’re not going to hear anything about this” from the Repugnican presidential candidates, she stated correctly. She states, among other things, that we need to raise the minimum wage, but she doesn’t tell us that she supports only a $12/hour minimum wage, not a $15/hour minimum wage.

6:43 p.m.: Billary states that the super-wealthy should pay at least 30 percent in taxes. Yup. She talks about helping small businesses, which is a canard frequently used by those of the center-right to support capitalism, even though capitalism stopped being about small businesses decades ago and has been about large to gargantuan corporations for decades now.

6:45 p.m.: Bernie states that while corporate America might love a President Billary, as she just said that they should, as president corporate America will hate him. Go, Bernie! Bernie reminds us that he won’t take campaign contributions from corporations. Greed is destroying our economy and the lives of million of Americans, he just said forcefully. Again, he’s on fire tonight.

6:47 p.m.: O’Malley just stated that the way forward is not through Bernie Sanders’ socialism, “which the rest of the world is moving away from” (let the fact-checkers sort that one out [and O’Malley’s shameless red-baiting is pathetic and is just another symptom of his desperation]) or Billary Clinton’s “crony capitalism.”

Bernie pretty much just ignores the red-bating bullshit and Billary once again tries to deflect, indicating that the Repugnicans are the main enemy. Weak. (She’s used this rather pathetic tactic in the previous debates.)

6:51 p.m.: Bernie reminds us once again that he has no super-PAC and that Billary has taken a lot of money from Wall Street over the years.

6:52 p.m.: The topic now is health care, including “Obamacare” (the Affordable Care Act). While “Obamacare” has made some improvements in our national health care system, such as no longer penalizing those with pre-existing conditions, out-of-pocket expenses and prescription-drug prices need to be reined in, Billary says. “We need to build on it and fix it,” she says (“it” apparently being “Obamacare”).

6:55 p.m.: Bernie calls for single-payer health care and proclaims that health care should be a right. I agree wholeheartedly. He points out that nations that pay much less for health care have better health-care outcomes than does the U.S. He states that under his plan, the average American family would save thousands of dollars a year on health-care costs.

6:58 p.m.: Bernie is asked how tuition-free college would work. He cites new sports facilities and overpaid college and university administrators as part of the problem of overpriced higher education. Bernie says a “speculation tax on Wall Street” would pay for his plan for tuition-free college.

7:00 p.m.: O’Malley touts “an income-based [student-loan] repayment plan.” I support a no-payment repayment plan — that is, student loans need to be eliminated altogether and we need to make higher education a right, just like health care. (We can afford to educate our people; we need only significantly pare down our bloated-beyond-belief military budget, which exists far more for fat government contracts for greedy traitors than it does for the actual defense of the nation.)

7:02 p.m.: Billary correctly states that the states have defunded their colleges and universities over the past decades and put the money elsewhere, such as prisons (and tax breaks for the wealthy, of course, I would add).

Billary does not support free tuition, however, she states. As I’ve said before, Billary wants a Band-Aid where an emergency surgery is required. She doesn’t go nearly far enough, which is part of her long history of progressive rhetoric but center-right action that preserves the status quo so that she doesn’t step on any toes so that the campaign cash keeps flowing to her coffers.

Billary Clinton and her fellow hypocritical baby boomers should want today’s college students to have it as well as they did when they were of college age, when the “greatest generation” gladly paid for their college education and did not saddle them with crippling student-loan debt.

7:08 p.m.: It just got a little feisty there between Bernie and Billary, but not rancorous, which is to the Democratic Party’s credit, I believe. I’m having live-streaming issues again, so I hope that I’m not missing anything right now…

7:10 p.m.: I guess we’re on break now. Harry Enten and Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com are being interviewed now. I like both of the nerds and read them regularly. Silver says Billary’s lead in Iowa “is not that large.” He says Billary still “has vulnerability in Iowa.” He says that Bernie can win both Iowa and New Hampshire. Wow.

I’m now having live-streaming issues yet once again… I missed what this Clair (spelling?) pundit had to say…

7:15 p.m.: We’re back to the debate. Now the topic is relations between law enforcement officers and civilians. O’Malley indicates that as mayor of Baltimore he inherited a deeply troubled city but that as mayor of the city and then as governor of Maryland he brought down crime and incarceration rates.

Bernie points out that we have 2.2 million, predominantly black and Latino, Americans behind bars. We need to end institutionalized racism and reform the criminal justice system, he says, adding that our law-enforcement officers need to stop shooting unarmed, predominantly black, Americans, and that the “war on drugs” needs to end. Police departments should look like the communities they serve and minimum sentencing must stop. We need more jobs and less incarceration, he said.

Bernie handled that question remarkably better than did Billary, whose repsonse was unremarkable and unmemorable, or O’Malley.

7:22 p.m.: Now the topic is drugs (primarily heroin and other opiates, apparently). Bernie says that addiction is a medical issue, not a criminal issue. Yup. He says part of a health-care overhaul must be fast and effective drug-addiction treatment. Yup.

Billary has “a five-point plan” to combat opiate abuse, she says. She advocates for greater availability of the drug Naloxone, which prevents opiate overdose deaths.

O’Malley is name-dropping again; apparently he has known people addicted to opiates. (When you’re unemployed, I guess, you have the opportunity to meet a lot of people…) He advocates for a $12 billion federal program to combat opiate addiction.

7:26 p.m.: Martha Raddatz brings the discussion back to Libya. “How much responsibility do you bear for the chaos that followed elections” in Libya, Martha just asked Billary. Wow.

Billary doesn’t really answer, but claims that things in Libya are getting better now, adding, “this is not easy work.”

That wasn’t good enough for Martha, who never lets you off easily. She repeats the question almost verbatim.

Billary claims that Libyans were not responsive to offers from help after Gadhafi was overthrown. So I guess she blames the Libyans.

“Were mistakes made?” Martha, probably exasperated, asks.

Billary still won’t actually answer the question.

7:30 p.m.: Bernie reminds us that regime change often doesn’t work. Overthrowing a dictator is relatively easy; it’s hard to predict what will happen after regime change, he said.

7:32 p.m.: O’Malley seems to share Bernie’s distaste for regime change. Before that, Billary made an odd remark that we need to both be able to support “strong men” in the Middle East and promote democracy. Whut?

7:34 p.m.: I guess this is the last question, and it’s a dumb one; apparently the question is whether or not it’s time to change the role of a president’s spouse, and it seems directed mainly at Bill Clinton, who would be the nation’s first first gentlemen should (shudder) Billary win the White House.

Bernie now is talking of his own wife, adding that she was a foster parent before he married her, and that as first lady of the U.S. she would be a “forceful advocate” for our youth.

O’Malley states that as first lady of Maryland, his wife was an advocate against domestic violence, but that as first lady of the nation she would do or not do whatever she pleased, that it would be up to her. (Why wouldn’t it be, Martin? Anyway, she won’t be first lady of the U.S. unless O’Malley becomes vice president and the president dies or otherwise no longer can serve in office, but OK…)

7:39 p.m.: A break now. We’re told there is “much more to come.” Oh, I hope not. This has been enough…

7:40 p.m.: Oh, good. George Stephanopoulos, of whom we’ve seen little tonight, thankfully, has said closing statements are close at hand. George and his ABC News companion are talking about the Repugnicans’ reponse to tonight’s debate thus far. I could give a shit what their response is…

7:44 p.m.: Closing statements now. Bernie first. “On our worst day” he and his two competitors for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination have more to offer the American people than the best that the Repugnican presidential contenders can offer the American people, he says. Yup.

Bernie says that he will bring about a “political revolution” in which millions stand up and say “enough is enough,” that “this country belongs to all of us, not to just a handful of billionaires.” (I quasi-paraphrase, but that’s pretty darn close.)

O’Malley now. He says tonight has been “a healthy exchange of ideas.” He says the Repugnican debates are filled with “anger” and “fear,” but not the Democrats’. Yeah. True that. Now O’Malley brings up climate change and reminds us that we live in “divided and polarized times.”

Billary now warns of a Repugnican taking over the White House in January 2017. She’s now pretty much fear-mongering, even though O’Malley just said that the Dems don’t do that…

Not that she’s wrong about what a Repugnican White House administration would do and how bad it would be for the nation, but she’s using the old Clintonian triangulating tactic of “Vote for me, because the Repugnicans are even worse and scarier!”

That lesser-of-two-evils tactic stopped being good enough long ago, if it ever was good enough. Read my lips: I. Will. Not. Vote. For. Billary. Clinton. Ever.

Jesus Christ. Billary just had the very last words of tonight’s debate, which were “May the Force be with you.”

Was that supposed to be funny? Did some nerdy, virginal intern come up with that, telling her it would make her appear to be hip? It was just awkward and a bit weird.

Anyway. The debate is over, thank Goddess. (While I still strongly maintain that it’s bullshit that thanks to Billarybot and Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz we have gone from 26 Democratic presidential primary debates in 2008 to six this cycle, I probably won’t complain that I have only three more live-blogging sessions to go. [Twenty-six debates in 2008 was excessive, but we could have gone with at least 10 or 12 this time around. Fuck, at least eight.])

I don’t think that this debate will help O’Malley. We’ll see whether his ageist comment comes back to haunt him or not. (Not that his poll numbers could go much lower…)

“Datagate” probably is pretty much over now — it was a “scandal” that lasted all of two days…

I believe that tonight Bernie Sanders had his best of three-thus-far debate performances. He gets a bit repetitive if you follow him, as I do, but that also is called keeping on message, for which I can’t fault a serious candidate. And I don’t see it as his inability to be flexible, but I see it as his recognition that important issues easily can be sidelined with the corporately owned and controlled “news” media’s scandal du jour, such as the San Bernardino massacre, and that we can’t solve our largest problems if we’re constantly bouncing around from one smaller thing to the next. (The corporations and the plutocrats who own and love them don’t want us to solve our largest problems, of course, since they are our largest problems.)

Billary Clinton just doesn’t excite me. Not only am I intimately familiar with her center-right/Repugnican-Lite record, but her rhetoric is so designed to appeal to and not to offend as many people as possible (including the Wall Street weasels who continue to give her campaign cash) that most of it is lifeless and uninspiring.

But that is lost on the Clintonistas, the Billarybots, I know.

Again, I don’t think that the race has changed based upon tonight’s debate. The race remains a two-way race between Bernie and Billary, the real Democrat and the Democrat in name only, respectively. If tonight’s debate helped either of them more than the other, my hunch is that it boosted Bernie a bit more than it did Billary, as for a long time now, I surmise, he’s had significantly more room for growth in support than she has had.

I think it’s telling that the only candidate who got booed tonight was Martin O’Malley, when he prickishly made his ageist comment. Could it be a harbinger of his dropping out? I wish, but, alas, it probably isn’t.

Perhaps tonight’s biggest takeaway message for me is Nate Silver’s statement that of course Bernie Sanders can win both Iowa and New Hampshire.

Let us hope that Bernie does — and finally drives that long-overdue stake through the cold and slimy hearts of Billary Clinton, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the many, many other DINOs everywhere.

—

*Fact check: Slate.com notes:

… Clinton’s statement that Sanders “voted for regime change” in Libya is questionable, since Congress didn’t vote on the issue, which was part of the whole problem: The Obama administration just announced late in the afternoon one day that it would establish a no-fly zone in Libya. (The Sanders campaign believes Clinton is referring to this nonbinding resolution that basically said Qaddafi is terrible and should go.)

Because the ABC moderators were frequently awful, Sanders never got an opportunity to respond. But he didn’t seem too upset with that, either. Later in the night, when the issue came up again, Sanders again didn’t jump in to defend himself against Clinton’s charge. …

Bernie Sanders soars under the radar

Updated below (on Saturday, December 12, 2015)

Associated Press photo

Bernie Sanders addresses a crowd in Davenport, Iowa, in October. Despite the myth that Sanders is “unelectable,” he is doing better against the top Repugnican Tea Party presidential candidates in match-up polling than is Billary Clinton. As I type this sentence, Real Clear Politics’ averages of match-up polling show Billary beating Donald Trump by 3.3 percent, whereas Sanders beats Trump by 8 percent. Sanders beats Ted Cruz by 5.6 percent, whereas Billary bests Cruz by only 2.5 percent. Neither Sanders nor Clinton beats Marco Rubio — who is, as I have said, the Repugnican Tea Party candidate to take down (Trump is just an incredibly loud distraction) — but while Rubio beats Bernie by only 0.7 percent, he beats Billary by 1.6 percent. Billary Clinton is so disliked by the electorate as a whole that the comparatively unknown Bernie Sanders does better than she does against the top-tier Repugnican Tea Party presidential wannabes.

A few items encouraging to us Bernie Sanders supporters have caught my eye over the past few days.

There are plenty of naysaying pieces on Sanders on the Internet that amount to screaming to us Sanders supporters, “Surrender, Dorothy! But in reality, we have no reason to give up.

First, as I’ve noted, Bernie Sanders is polling significantly better than is Billary Clinton against the top three Repugnican Tea Party presidential contenders (Donald Trump, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz) in match-up polling. (Again, I’m quite confident that Ben Carson will not emerge as the Repugnican Tea Party’s presidential nominee.)

As El Trumpo himself might say, that’s yuuuuuge. It annihilates the “argument,” the conventional “wisdom,” that only Billary can win the White House. In Reality Land, there is a good chance that she cannot.

But then there’s also this (from refinery29.com):

Though there’s no way to know exactly how Americans will vote in the 2016 elections, one university has a perfect record when it comes to predicting presidential outcomes.

Western Illinois University has correctly prognosticated each president since 1975, and it’s got some ideas about next year’s contest, too. According to the university’s mock election, the 45th president of the United States will be Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who’s running as a Democrat in 2016. The university also predicted that former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley will be Sanders’ vice president.

So how did the university reach its conclusion about Sanders? While his main opponent in the Democratic field, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, is leading in many polls, Sanders has managed to raise support from small donors at an unprecedented pace. The senator has supporters from a variety of demographics, explains Liberal America, which makes him a highly electable candidate. And a recent Quinnipiac poll found that Sanders is polling better than all of the GOP’s 2016 presidential candidates, including Donald Trump.

In WIU’s mock presidential election, Sanders garnered more than 400 Electoral College votes. A proposed Jeb Bush/Marco Rubio ticket, meanwhile, earned just 114 Electoral College votes in the mock election. As for the popular vote in WIU’s mock election, Sanders beat Clinton in 22 out of 26 primary states there, too.

Thousands of students at the university simulated the election process, including Iowa caucuses, state primaries, nominating conventions, and the Electoral College vote, from October 20 to November 2, in order to determine the results.

I find it interesting and encouraging that the university that correctly has predicted the next U.S. president since 1975 has predicted that Bernie Sanders will be our next president. (I’m not wild about Martin O’Malley as Bernie’s running mate, but O’Malley is better than is Billary, who wouldn’t deign to be Sanders’ running mate. But Sanders shouldn’t ask her, as her center-right political record and philosophy are contradictory to his left-of-center record and philosophy.)

There’s this, too, from Matthew Yglesias for Vox.com (emphases in bold are mine):

Donald Trump, as you have probably heard, is dominating national polls of Republicans who want to lead their party in the 2016 presidential election. As you have likewise probably heard, Hillary Clinton is currently crushing left-wing challenger Bernie Sanders in national polls of Democrats.

What you have probably not heard as much about is that Trump and Sanders have approximately equal levels of public support. …

Trump right now is a few percentage points ahead of Sanders in terms of the number of Republicans backing him versus the number of Democrats backing Sanders. But because there are more Democrats than Republicans in America, Philip Bump of the Washington Post reckons that there are actually slightly more Sanders supporters in America than Trump supporters.

Nonetheless, Trump has dominated media coverage of the 2016 campaign while Sanders has largely been a non-factor in coverage since Clinton started handing in solid debate performances.

The reasons for this are not exactly mysterious – Trump is ahead in the polls and might win the GOP nomination, while Sanders is losing badly and clearly won’t be the Democratic candidate.

But while the media’s priorities are comprehensible, the horse race fact that mainstream Democrats have consolidated around a single champion while the non-Trump Republicans remain badly divided is creating a distorted picture of the real state of the country. Wall-to-wall Trump coverage is, for example, helping boost morale at white supremacist groups, which are now benefiting from a newfound sense of momentum.

But while there is clearly significance in the fact that a large minority of Republicans are willing to flock to Trump’s banner and the cause of ethnic chauvinism, the reality that an equal number of people are flocking to Sanders’s banner and the vision of an expansive Nordic welfare state is equally significant.

Indeed, in terms of analyzing broad trends in American life, the Sanders phenomenon is probably more significant than Trumpism. Trump’s supporters, after all, are older than the average Republican, while Sanders’s are younger than the average Democrat. The Trump movement is benefiting from an exceptionally chaotic situation among mainstream Republicans, while Sanders is up against the strongest non-incumbent frontrunner in American political history.

In the short term, that all means that Trump is more relevant to 2016. But the values that Sanders reflects are likely to grow stronger in future cycles, while Trumpism is likely to grow weaker.

Don’t get me wrong; I’ll take the word of the students of Western Illinois University over Yglesias’ where it comes to Bernie Sanders’ chances of winning the 2016 Democratic Party presidential nomination (and then the White House). But I like (and agree with) Yglesias’ conclusion that the future belongs to us Sandersistas, not to the Trumpites.

And, as I’ve noted before, if Sanders’ 2016 run ends up like Barry Goldwater’s run in 1964 – if in retrospect it’s clear that Sanders rescued the Democratic Party from the death grip of the center-right Clintons – then we can count Sanders’ 2016 run as a win, whether he becomes our next president or not.

Speaking of which, it’s true that Billary’s lead in nationwide polls have her far ahead of Bernie – 55.4 percent to 30.8 percent, per Real Clear Politics’ average of polls, and 55 percent to 31 percent, per the Huffington Post’s average of polls. So it seems safe to conclude that right now, nationwide, Billary does beat Bernie by more than 20 percentage points in the polls.

But the nation won’t be voting and caucusing for the 2016 Democratic Party presidential nominee as a whole on one day, but states will be voting and caucusing over the course of many weeks. And wins in early states often (if not usually) snowball into wins in successive states.

First to vote (caucus) will be Iowa, on February 1.

Yes, Billary is leading Bernie by double digits in Iowa polling right now – by about 14 percentage points, per RCP, and by 19 percent, per HuffPo – but, as prognosticator god Nate Silver pointed out recently, since 2004, “In Iowa, on average, only 35 percent of voters had come to a final decision before the final month of the campaign. And in New Hampshire, only 29 percent had.”

That leaves plenty of room for Bernie to win Iowa, as we have more than a month and a half before Iowans caucus.

And Bernie Sanders leads Billary in New Hampshire, which votes on February 9. RCP has him 4 percent ahead of Billary there, while HuffPo has him 1 percent ahead of her there.

Should Sanders pull out a first-place finish in Iowa – which we were taught is not an impossibility when, in 2004, the “inevitable” Howard Dean came in at third place in Iowa after the moribund John Kerry came back from the dead like Lazarus on crack and came in at No. 1 in Iowa and then went on to win the nomination (due to the aforementioned snowball effect) – Sanders no doubt would win New Hampshire, too.

And I don’t see Billary recovering from Sanders winning both Iowa and New Hampshire.

It’s true that Donald Trump has been sucking most of the oxygen from the room, and that the pundits (like Yglesias) have coronated Billary Clinton as the 2016 Democratic Party presidential nominee already.

But the pundits and the corporately owned and controlled media whores won’t be caucusing and voting in Iowa and New Hampshire (well, the vast majority of them don’t live in those two states, anyway).

I suspect that in February we will see, rather jarringly, that there are two parallel “realities” in the United States of America: (1) our corporately mediated “reality” that pumps up center-right, pro-corporate political candidates like Trump and Billary and, at best, mostly ignores truly populist candidates like Bernie Sanders, since truly populist candidates like Sanders aren’t great for the corporations and the plutocracy; and (2) actual reality, which consists of individuals voting and caucusing the way that they want to, not the way that they’re told to by our corporate/plutocratic overlords.

I suspect that for some time now, Bernie Sanders, in actual reality, has been soaring under the radar of our corporately mediated “reality.”

While we might compare Sanders to the tortoise in the parable of the tortoise and the hare, I think that I’d rather liken him to the bald eagle that had to put Donald Trump in his place.

P.S. I get it that way too many “superdelegates” have jumped the gun, voicing their support for Billlary before we, the people, have weighed in on our choice between Billary and Bernie, but how would these “superdelegates” proceed if Bernie pummels Billary in the caucuses and primary elections?

Many if not most of these “superdelegates” are, after all, accountable to the voters. And they aren’t bound to supporting Billary; they may flip their support to Bernie instead.

Update (Saturday, December 12, 2015): I find it interesting that within 24 hours of my having written that there exists a “corporately mediated ‘reality’ that pumps up center-right, pro-corporate political candidates like [Donald] Trump and Billary [Clinton] and, at best, mostly ignores truly populist candidates like Bernie Sanders,” the Sanders campaign put out an e-mail that reads:

I’ve always been interested in media and have always been concerned that corporate media doesn’t really educate people in this country. They refuse to talk about the serious issues facing our country.

That’s why I wasn’t surprised yesterday when I saw this headline: “Report: ABC World News Tonight Has Devoted 81 Minutes to Trump, One Minute to Sanders.”

It’s no shock to me that big networks, which are controlled by a handful of large corporations, have barely discussed our campaign and the important issues we are bringing up. They’re just too busy covering Donald Trump.

We can’t allow the corporate media to set the agenda. We have got to get the real issues out there. And that’s why I’m asking you to join me in a major petition to the big networks.

Add your name to our petition to tell ABC, NBC and CBS to cover our campaign — and more importantly to cover the issues we are bringing up.

This is what the corporate media is all about: more Americans support our campaign than Trump’s according to recent polls, but still ABC’s news program has spent 81 minutes on Trump and only 20 seconds talking about us. NBC Nightly News only spent 2.9 minutes covering our campaign. CBS? They spent six minutes.

The point is: our political revolution certainly will not be televised. It’s more important than ever for us to hold the large corporations that control the media accountable.

Please sign our petition to tell the big networks to put aside their corporate interests and allow for a free and fair debate in this presidential campaign.

I know we can win this fight if we all work to get the message out there.

In solidarity,

Bernie Sanders

I encourage you to sign the petition.

The corporately owned and controlled mass media give more time not only to Donald Trump over Bernie Sanders, but also to the many Repugnican Tea Party presidential wannabes, like Jeb! Bush, Chris Christie, Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina and even Lindsey Graham, who aren’t polling at even 4 percent within their own party and who don’t have nearly the chance of securing their party’s presidential nomination that Bernie Sanders does of securing his.

As Matthew Yglesias points out in his piece above, “Sanders is up against the strongest non-incumbent frontrunner in American political history.” Given that fact, Bernie Sanders is, again, soaring — albeit under the radar of the corporately mediated “reality” in which we live.

P.S. Sanders’ e-mail correctly notes, as I noted yesterday, that Donald Trump is sucking all of the oxygen from the room, but the media are covering El Trumpo not only because he is, as he has been called, a carnival barker (on crack, I would add), but also because the plutocrats who own and control our corporate media would much rather that their media outlets cover The Donald’s latest “gaffe” than cover issues that might actually threaten treasonous corporate/plutocratic profiteering, such as:

Income inequality (including, of course, the need to pay every worker a living wage, the necessity of forcing the rich and the super-rich to pay their fair share of taxes, and the need to whack the Wall Street weasels), climate change (our No. 1 problem, even though it might not be evident to us on an everyday basis, because it’s a slow, ongoing progressive problem), the unaffordability of health care (including, of course, treasonously priced pharmaceuticals) and of higher education (student loans have got to go — we must foster our youth, not treat them as cash cows), our crumbling-from-neglect infrastructure, and the waste of billions and billions and billions of our tax dollars on the treasonous war profiteering of the military-corporate complex.

Jump on in, Joe! (And down with Debbie! More debates!)

Reuters photo

Veep Joe Biden, pictured above earlier this month at a Jewish community in center in Florida, is said to be ready to jump into the presidential race within the next month. I hope that he does. While we’re talking about Biden, let’s talk about Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the pathetically ineffectual head of the Democratic National Committee, left, who sorely needs to be replaced by someone who actually is competent and who isn’t a DINO who is only trying to coronate fellow DINO Billary Clinton, such as by limiting the number of Democratic Party presidential primary debates to a paltry six. (The number of Repugnican Tea Party presidential primary debates is 12, three of which already have taken place.)

The political chatter is that Vice President Joe Biden plans to jump into the 2016 Democratic Party presidential primary contest within the next month.*

I welcome him in with arms wide open.

Prognosticator king Nate Silver, after all, recently wrote, in an article about Billary Clinton’s being “stuck in a poll-deflating feedback loop,” that “Biden is being included in most polls of the Democratic race, and his numbers have improved as the media has given more coverage to his potential campaign, with most of that support coming from Clinton.” (Link is Silver’s.)

That’s what I’d already figured: That because Biden is an establishment Democrat like Billary, Biden’s entry into the race would take more support from Billary than from the anti-establishment Bernie Sanders.

Not only would such a three-way race (let’s face it, Martin O’Malley, Jim Webb and Lincoln Chafee aren’t contenders [look at their polling]) help Sanders more than anyone else in the race, but it has been pathetic that more than a dozen fascists have been duking it out for the Repugnican Tea Party presidential nomination but that thus far the Democratic Party has had only two real announced contenders (Bernie and Billary).

We would see if an official entry into the race would help Biden’s polling numbers. Thus far, almost all nationwide polls of Democrats and Democratic leaners put Biden in third place, behind Billary at No. 1 and Bernie Sanders at No. 2.

If Biden were to jump in and his third-place status doesn’t improve in the polls, I’d say that he’s a pretty weak candidate. I mean, he’s the vice fucking president, for fuck’s sake. But I wouldn’t be surprised if he never breaks out of his third-place status — after all, he ran for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 1988 and in 2008 and the voters rejected him then.

Biden is not a strong candidate, and sympathy for his recently deceased son won’t put him into the White House. (I’m not being mean; just being honest.)

A columnist for The Hill recently put forth the interesting idea that “Biden could at some point announce he is running to be a one-term president, with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) as his vice-presidential nominee and preferred successor in 2020.”

He adds, “This Biden-Warren unity ticket would be a fusion of the experience of Clinton with the progressivism of Sanders to achieve the progressive populist majority waiting to be born.”

Meh. I, for one, don’t want another four years of a Clintonesque, milquetoast, Democrat-in-name-only presidency. I don’t want progressivism to be deferred for another four fucking years; we already have lost eight critical years under Caretaker in Chief Barack Obama, another Clintonesque DINO who relentlessly had promised us “hope” and “change” but who has delivered only More of the Same.

Anyway, I don’t see Warren joining a Biden ticket while Billary is still in the running for the presidency — Warren thus far very apparently has been quite reluctant to step on Queen Billary’s royal red cape — but in the unlikely event that a Biden-Warren ticket actually emerges from the 2016 Democratic Party presidential primary contest, I probably could hold my nose and vote for Biden in November 2016, but only because of the promise of a future Warren presidency.

I cannot, however, foresee myself ever casting a vote for Repugnican Lite Billary Clinton, no matter who the 2016 Repugnican Tea Party presidential candidate turns out to be, even His Royal Trumpness. (Billary, if she emerges as her party’s 2016 presidential candidate, would win my state of California, with all of its 55 electoral votes, anyway, so I wouldn’t need to vote for her; my not voting for her would make zero difference at all. [Unfortunately, some readers do need to be reminded that the U.S. president is not elected by a popular vote, but by the Electoral College…])

Joe Biden may do as he wishes. Unlike the anti-democratic DINOs who claim that certain people (like Ralph Nader) shouldn’t run for president, I believe in democracy, which necessitates that anyone who is qualified to run for president and wishes to do so not be dissuaded from doing so. Let anyone who wishes to run to run and let’s see who wins the contest, for fuck’s sake; let democracy happen.

In the meantime, I continue my steadfast support for Bernie Sanders. Not out of stubbornness, but because I still believe that on the Democratic side he would be the best — the most progressive — president of the United States of America.

And I’m not alone; Sanders leads Billary by around 10 points in New Hampshire and is at least tied with her in Iowa.

Next month will be an interesting one, with the first of the significantly-too-few Democratic presidential primary debates** set for October 13 in Las Vegas (Nevada is the third state to weigh in, with its caucuses scheduled in February, after the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire) — and with Billary set to testify publicly before Congress on the bullshit Benghazigate yet again on October 22.

Hey, I loathe the Repugnican Tea Party traitors, who shamelessly crassly are using the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi in 2012 only for their own political advantage — I mean, Mittens Romney tried but failed miserably to use Benghazi for political gain way back in 2012 — but as I very much don’t want Billary to be the Democratic presidential nominee, I can’t bring myself to defend her too much.

Not only is Billary a despicable, a self-serving sellout, but her political weakening means my chosen candidate’s political strengthening.

Joe Biden jumping into the race and another Benghazi hearing within the same month or so can only help Bernie Sanders.

October should be full of surprise for the Clintonistas.

—

*Slate.com’s Daniel Politi writes today (links are Politi’s):

On the question of whether Vice President Joe Biden will enter the presidential race, it now looks more like an issue of when, rather than if, reports the Wall Street Journal. In Biden’s circle it seems conversations are now more focused on when would be the best time for the vice president to throw his hat in the ring. Regardless, the Journal warns that nothing is certain yet, pointing out that Biden “could still back out if he finds the emotional toll from the death of his elder son, Beau Biden, too much to overcome.”

Some in Biden’s team want the vice president to jump into the race soon so he can get a spot in the Democratic debate scheduled for October 13. Yet his advisers also have another date in their heads: October 22. That’s when Hillary Clinton is scheduled to testify in a House committee on Benghazi. It is seen as a pivotal moment for her campaign that could weaken or strengthen the former secretary of state’s candidacy. And the opinion there is split. Some want Biden to delay any decision until after the hearing, while others say it will look too opportunistic if he waits for Clinton to stumble in order to join the race.

The Journal article comes shortly after key fundraiser Josh Alcorn was overheard on Amtrak saying that “I am 100 percent that Joe is in,” according to the National Review. Alcorn reportedly expressed uncertainty about when the announcement would be but guessed it was going to take place in mid-October.

These latest signs of Biden’s apparent willingness to enter the race comes as almost 50 prominent Democratic fundraisers and party activists signed a letter calling on Biden to run for president due to the “spectacular success” of the Obama-Biden administration. [“Spectacular success”? Really? Again, while the worst president of my lifetime of course was the unelected war criminal George W. Bush, with Ronald Reagan in second place, Obama at best has been a caretaker president.] “To finish the job, America needs a leader who is respected both home and abroad, and who understands the real challenges facing American families. In our opinion, the next president must be Joe Biden. If he announces he’s running, we’re all in. It’s a campaign we know he will win,” the letter says.

**Democratic National Committee head Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who is just another fucking DINO, really, really, really needs to go. She never should have been made head of the party in the first fucking place, but now that she has helped to drive the party into the ground (after former DNC head Howard Dean had built the party up), she sorely needs to be replaced with someone who is competent.

Wasserman Schultz’s steadfast refusal to allow more than six Democratic presidential primary debates is anti-democratic, anti-Democratic and unpardonable.

If you agree — and you should — you can sign MoveOn.org’s petition calling for Wasserman Schultz’s removal as head of the Democratic Party here.