Category Archives: Bernie Sanders
Is Bernie Sanders a Democrat
Is Bernie Sanders a Democrat? Here’s the Bern in his own words from PolitiFact:
“I am not now, nor have I ever been, a liberal Democrat,” he said in a 1985 New England Monthly profile, according to Politico.
“Socialist is the political and economic philosophy I hold, not a party I run under,” he explained in 1988, when he unsuccessfully ran for Congress.
After calling it “ideologically bankrupt,” Sanders lobbied for admission into the Democratic caucus for practical reasons (getting coveted committee assignments, mustering votes for bills), according to news reports from his first year in Congress. But party leaders wouldn’t let him join as he refused to become a Democrat.
When asked if he would officially join the party on April 30, 2015, when he announced his candidacy, Sanders said, “No, I am an independent who is going to be working with the —” cutting himself off mid-sentence.
But last night he urged his supporters to vote for Hillary Clinton. The Bern got booed.
The Struggle Continues
Hillary is the presumptive nominee but Bernie says, “The struggle continues!”
President Obama says, “I endorse Hillary.” “I don’t think there’s ever been a more qualified candidate to hold the office.”
And what does FBI Director Comey say?
Feeling the Bern in Venezuela
Hugo Chavez used to give heating oil to poor Americans through Joe Kennedy’s Citizen’s Energy Corp. Now the mayor of Caracas tweets that Venezuelans are hunting cats and dogs for dinner.
Regular blackouts shut down hospital respirators for hours in Venezuela according to the NYT. Glenn Reyonolds, at USA Today, says socialism doesn’t help poor people. It creates them.
The Bern in Venezuela
Bernie Sanders says he’s for Denmark style socialism. Danes aren’t pleased. T.D. Tuccille, in Reason, quotes Bernie Sanders giving a shoutout to Socialism’s ability to make people equally poor:
“Sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is because people are lining up for food. That’s a good thing,” Sanders told interviewers in 1985. “In other countries people don’t line up for food; the rich get the food and the poor starve to death.”
The Venezuelan elite aren’t eating their pets. Chavez’s daughter is believed to have a net worth in the billions.
Superdelegates
The idea for this one crept into my head while I was reading the NYT story by David Samuels about “Obama’s foreign policy guru” Ben Rhodes.
Rhodes bragged about planting a false narrative about the Iran nuclear deal to make the agreement seem more palatable to the American public. He claimed that the election of Iranian moderates is what sparked the deal. In reality President Obama sparked the deal by reaching out to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei long before that.
I was mulling over that little subterfuge when Bernie Sanders popped up on the television screen (I was multitasking), complaining again about the rigged Democratic primary.
The Economist explains here how the Ayatollah picks the candidates in Iran. Law/Street explains here how superdelegates pick candidates in America.
Coal Country Candidate
Bernie Sanders beat Hillary Clinton in the West Virginia primary 51.4% to 35.8%.
Before the primary an unemployed coal miner confronted Hillary for acknowledging that her policies would put a lot of coal miners out of work. She claimed that her remarks were taken out of context. Here are her remarks in context from Politifact:
So for example, I’m the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right?
And we’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories.
Now we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don’t want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on.
Aside from EPA mandates, coal is being displaced by a cheaper and cleaner fuel – natural gas produced by fracking.
