This Can't Be Happening!

Bernie Sanders remains behind Hillary Clinton in the number of pledged delegates he has amassed over the course of just under two and a half months of primaries and caucuses. But her advantage in pledged delegates has fallen over the last month and a half from a high point of well over 300 to a current 213. (His actual gap may even be below 200 now, because or a miscount belatedly acknowledged by the Colorado Democratic Party there, and because while Washington state’s delegates have not yet all been allocated following the initial caucus, it is clear that the majority of unallocated ones will end up going to Sanders based on the initial caucus results.)

And that’s with 1646 pledged delegates yet to be chosen in future primaries and caucuses, a process which will begin this coming Tuesday in New York (247 pledged delegates on the line) and end on June 7 (when a total of 714 pledged delegates will be up for grabs in six states and the District of Columbia).

As Sanders’ campaign has repeatedly said, he has a reasonable chance of closing that gap and winning a majority of the pledged delegates.

Many critics — including people who aren’t even Sanders’ supporters — have denounced the devious and biased way major media outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post and most of the major television networks, have followed the Clinton campaign’s lead in including so-called Superdelegates in the totals (Clinton has over 400 of these unelected delegates, whose positions are allocated to the various states and other primary jurisdictions, and who are mostly elected officials, party officials and lobbyists supportive of the Democratic Party leadership, and Sanders has just 38). This distorted count has been used for months now to insist, falsely, that Clinton “has a lock” on the nomination. But this has always been deceptive counting, because those delegates, while claimed by Clinton and to a far lesser lesser extent Sanders, are not pledged at all but are free to change their minds.

They might, for instance, do that if they felt that Clinton was unelectable (a not unreasonable assumption, particularly if between now and the July convention she were to be indicted by the US Justice Department for violating federal law in keeping her emails as Secretary of State on a private hackable server).

But the big issue not discussed at all is that all of Clinton’s margin of pledged delegates were picked up by her in a string of early primaries in the deep South states, just as planned in “reforms” of the primary process made by the neo-liberal DNC leadership in the years following the near success of insurgent peace candidate Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and the successful nomination of insurgent anti-war candidate Sen. George McGovern four years later in 1972. McGovern’s successful march through the primaries terrified establishment Democrats, and so, by the 1990s, Super Tuesday in the South had been established, followed by a move of several other southern states including Texas to earlier dates. The idea was that the more conservative southern Democrats would not support any radical candidates outside of the mainstream, and that by killing such candidacies off early in the South, they would end up starved of funding and would see their campaigns wither away.

The strategy worked marvelously in prior years and this year for Clinton. Remember, in late February and early March Sanders was largely unknown outside of New England. The Democratic party is marginalized in the by now uniformly Republican-run Deep South, and black voters are disproportionately its backers — people who understandably view it as critical to their survival to keep Republicans from also controlling the federal government. And even among those few black voters who knew of Sanders and of his strong history of Civil Rights Movement activism and of his consistent support for minority issues and for the nation’s poor as a member of Congress, he was deemed at primary time to be a long shot to win in any general election. Clinton was thus the overwhelming victor in those early primaries, particularly among black voters. In fact, just between Feb. 27 (South Carolina) and March 8 (Mississippi), she picked up 378 more delegates than Sanders, largely because of the fiction promoted by her campaign and touted in the corporate media that she would be “more electable” than Sanders in the general election.

Clinton is ahead in pledged delegates but the truth is she's been losing ground to Sanders since after May 8
 

Bernie Sanders had a shining moment last week at a massive rally in Philadelphia at the Temple University Liacouras Sports Center. The high point came when he mentioned that his opponent, Hillary Clinton, had implied that he was “not qualified” to be president — a charge that she has continued to make in a tense campaign for the April 19 Democratic primary in New York state.

As 10,000 people in the stadium erupted in an enthusiastic chorus of boos, Sanders declared that in his view it is Clinton who’s “not qualified” for the presidency. He cited her $15 million in “donations” from Wall Street banks, her vote to support the Iraq War, and her support for “almost every trade agreement” sent to Congress during her years in Washington.

If Sanders had at that point said, “Well I’m nonetheless going to endorse her for president if she ends up winning the nomination in this primary campaign,” I am certain he would have been shouted down. He didn’t though. Instead, he made that submissive statement two days later in a CBS interview with the execrable Charlie Rose, who pressed him and pressed him (but who has not pressed Clinton similarly) to renounce his claim that Clinton is “not qualified” for the White House.

Sanders caved, and said “of course” he would endorse her candidacy if she were the Democratic nominee.

Right there in that moment, Sanders lost half his support — at least the die-hard support from people who were ready to stand in freezing rain if need be on April 19 in New York or April 26 in Philadelphia to vote for him, and to come to Philadelphia in sweltering July to take the streets and demand that he get the Democratic Party’s nomination.

Those fighters are not going to go to the mat for a guy who, if he has the nomination stolen away — which is what is happening — just gives his blessing to a candidate he has rightly described as a craven shill for the nation’s corporate elite, including the criminal elite who run the Wall Street banks, and walks away from the primaries.

If being owned by corporations and the rich is a qualification for the presidency, who's qualified: Bernie or Hillary?
 

People on the hard left have claimed from the beginning that the Sanders campaign is just a scam — a plan to “sheep-dog” progressive Democratic and independent voters into voting for someone — Hillary Clinton — who no progressive in her or his right mind would support: a serial war-monger, a former board member of Walmart, an ardent backer of her husband’s tough-on-crime legislation that made the US into the incarceration capital of the world, and a supporter of globalization and the trade treaties that have gutted jobs in the US. I don’t think this was a conspiracy on Sanders’ part. If it were, he would not have called her out as unqualified last Wednesday in Philadelphia (twice actually, at the Temple U. rally and later at a press conference with leaders of national unions that had endorsed him) for being a corporate tool. But I do believe that if he is serious about his campaign being all about promoting a “political revolution” to get money out of US politics, he cannot support Clinton — a candidate who’s all about sucking up to corporate power in hopes of getting corporate money. (Of course, it could be that Sanders is in a kind of box. If he says outright that he will not endorse Clinton if she wins the nomination, then if he goes on to win, many angry Clinton backers won’t support him. Perhaps he feels it’s better to fudge on that if and until the issue really has to be addressed.)

 
If the 5% disappeared
And the 95% became the 100%
There would be a tomorrow.
We could buy maybe another hundred years
To get our shit together.
There would be an ease of panic.
The doomsday clock would back off
A few minutes from midnight.
Everyone in the world would have enough.
It’s possible. See,
We aren’t all equal.
We’re not all the same.
We’re not all in the same boat.
Some are in a sinking raft
Trying to get to a safe landfall.
Some are in a sturdy lifeboat
With cover and adequate rations.
And some are in a yacht
Partying their brains out.
(I didn’t even know how to spell yacht.)
Guilt is a funny thing.
If you’re guilty
Guilt becomes your yoke
And people who are looking for workers
To service their estates,
Clean up after their mess,
Feed them,
Educate their children,
Groom their dogs,
Don’t have to look far for help.
If we want to make the crisis go away,
First we have to stop feeling guilty
And realize that we aren’t the problem.
The problem is that we,
In the lifeboat
Think that we are the problem,
And guilt is devouring
Our ability to act.
The problem is
That we are
Taking on the guilt
That belongs to those who are truly guilty.
No, we are not all in the same boat.
But the ones in the sinking raft
Can use some help.
And the ones in the yacht?
They have to know they are guilty.
 
 
    –Gary Lindorff

Philadelphia — Something “YUGE” is happening in the Democratic presidential campaign, and perhaps in the broader American body politic. It’s hard to put your finger on it, but like that feeling of your neck hairs rising off your skin as a big thunderstorm approaches, you know it’s big and it’s coming.

For me it was going with my wife and a friend to join a line of people waiting to get into Temple University’s 10,000-seat basketball arena for a hastily planned address by Democratic candidate for president Bernie Sanders.

When we got to the campus early yesterday, there was already a crowd of young people camped out by the entrance to the Liacouras Center. They told me they had been there since 6:30 am for an event that was scheduled to start at 8 pm, with doors opening at 5 pm. Already a line stretched back to the corner of Broad Street, around the corner and halfway down the block on Montgomery. Most of those in the line were students from Temple or from one or another of Philadelphia’s many other universities. They were white, black, latino and Asian, with a smattering of older folks. I went off to do some work, with plans for our little band to join the line around 4:30.

Big mistake! By the time we headed out to get in line, it was winding around the huge sports complex, snaking up and down several alleys and back to Broad, and then down Broad for another six blocks — about half a mile of people in all with more piling on all the time. At many places this line of people was eight to 10 across, and fairly densely packed, as people tried to shelter each other from a biting cold wind.

What was astonishing in all this was that there had been no long build-up to the event. No advance news reports, no posters, no organizations arriving with buses. It all seemed to have come together via social media in a day’s time.

By the time the line back where we were blocks from the arena finally began to move it was about 7 pm, and it took over an hour for us to get close to the entrance. At that point volunteer organizers were advising us that the arena was about full, and that we’d have a better chance of hearing the candidate in person if we abandoned the line and moved to a smaller 7,000-seat practice basketball arena in an adjacent building, where we were told Sanders would speak briefly before going to the main hall. A huge part of the line broke away behind us and began sprinting to the overflow venue. We chose to gamble and wait in the main line hoping we’d make the cut-off. Eventually, we managed to get in.

Inside, the seated crowd, which now included a fair percentage of adults, was really pumped. When Sanders, his trademark unkempt white hair flying, and his wife Jane O’Meara Sanders were spotted making their way towards the catwalk to the podium through a tunnel under the seats, a roar erupted from the crowd and became a thunderous chant of “Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!”

A movement in the making?: Bernie Sanders greets supporters at a rally of 17,000 at Temple University in Philadelphia
 

Sanders took it from there, with a powerful speech that riffed through every issue of the campaign. But there was a new edge to this address. Fresh off of his landslide 14%-margin win over Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin, Sanders ripped into his opponent, who had just that day (citing a cheap-shot sandbagging interview of him by editors at the New York Daily News that news organizations from the Washington Post to CNN had been shamelessly misquoting and partially quoting) called Sanders unqualified for the White House.

Sanders Hits Clinton Hard as Being ‘Unqualified for President’

Sanders, who until that point has been restrained in his attacks on Clinton, continuing to suggest that he would support her if she were to win the nomination, in a blistering counter-attack, told the wildly cheering crowd at the Liacouras Center, “She has been saying lately that she thinks I am quote, unquote ‘not qualified’ to be president. I don’t believe that she is qualified … if she is, through her super PAC, taking tens of millions of dollars in special interests funds.”

 
In the Lenin Barracks in Barcelona, the day before I joined the militia, I saw an Italian militiaman standing in front of the officers’ table. … Something in his face deeply moved me. It was the face of a man who would commit murder and throw away his life for a friend — the kind of face you would expect in an Anarchist, though as likely as not he was a Communist. … I hardly know why, but I have seldom seen anyone — any man, I mean — to whom I have taken such an immediate liking.
                                                                              – The opening of Homage To Catalonia by George Orwell
 

John McCain is certainly an interesting American politician. To be politically correct, maybe I should call him an American “warrior/politician,” since he’s a key leader in the post-911 culture saturated with the warrior-ethos. Last month, this warrior/politician wrote an op-ed in The New York Times that I can’t get out of my mind.

In the piece titled “The Good Soldier,” McCain saluted Delmer Berg whose obituary had run March 2nd in the Times. (Belatedly appreciating the irony, the Times changed the op-ed’s title online to: “John McCain: Salute To a Communist.”) Berg, who died at age 100, was presumably the last living American veteran of the famous Abraham Lincoln Brigade that fought on the Republican side in Spain against a 1936 fascist coup led by the caudillo general Francisco Franco, certainly a warrior/politician of his day. The Republic had been constitutionally set up and its leaders duly-elected after the monarchy collapsed in 1931. The Soviet Union supported the Republican side and Hitler and Mussolini supported the Fascists. The Republican side had a romantic, underdog quality that drew writers and adventures like George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway.

Proud American communist Delmer Berg in 2014 and in 1938 in Spain, second from right in beret

In 1937, Berg was a 21-year-old dishwasher who saw a poster for the Lincoln Brigade and signed up. He soon shipping out to Spain on an ocean liner; he was eventually wounded and sent home. Of the 3000 American volunteers who fought in Spain, around 800 were killed. The Fascists prevailed in 1939. Berg joined the Communist Party in 1943. The Times called him “an unreconstructed communist.” A newspaper in California asked Berg what were the proudest moments of his life; one he said was “when one of my grandsons was valedictorian at his Oregon high school graduation and said in a newspaper interview, ‘My grandfather is my inspiration. He’s a Communist!’ ”

 
 
We were at Shelby’s at the bar and Jeff,
Who was watching Fox News,
Slams down his empty bottle
And says,
I’m so sick of hearing about damn red herrings
I’m going to catch me one.
Is anyone with me?
 
A chorus of Ayes and Aye captain!
Jeff’s boat had just come out of dry dock.
We all knew it was just an excuse
To get out of painting his basement,
But we were all on our third or fourth brew
And it didn’t take much.
So we were going to catch some red herring!
 
We’re all Bernie-supporters and
Were buoyed by his recent wins in the primaries
And the appearance of the sparrow
At his Portland rally.
As I say, it doesn’t take much.
The seas were heavy and white-capped
As soon as we cleared the jetty.
 
If it was just the lifting and rolling
It wouldn’t have been a worry
But the wind was gusting from the southeast.
Never a good sign;
Even I know that.
Occasionally we would get nailed
And the boat would shudder.
 

Women’s health advocates were uniformly jubilant on March 30, 2016 when the FDA updated its labeling for the medication, mifepristone. Mifepristone, sold under the brand name Mifeprex by Danco Laboratories, is commonly referred to as “the abortion pill.” It is used in combination in the United States with misoprostol to provide medical abortions. Medical abortions account for nearly a quarter of all abortions and over a third of all abortions before nine weeks of gestation.

Raegan McDonald-Mosley the chief medical office of Planned Parenthood described the change as “a significant step forward for science, for women, and for health care providers.” Vick Saporta, the president of the National Abortion Federation said that she was “delighted” by the change. Amy Hagstrom Miller, the president of Whole Women’s Health, the plaintiff in the case against Texas HB2, stated “[the] label change…is a significant advancement for women in the United States.”

Their elation is understandable. In an era of illegal and misleading smear campaigns and aggressive TRAP laws (“Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers“), the FDA announcement is a welcome victory. Since 2010, states have adopted 345 abortion restrictions, an unprecedented number of assaults on women’s health.

Women’s health advocates were uniformly jubilant on March 30, 2016 when the FDA updated its labeling for the medication, mifepristone. Mifepristone, sold under the brand name Mifeprex by Danco Laboratories, is commonly referred to as “the abortion pill.” It is used in combination in the United States with misoprostol to provide medical abortions. Medical abortions …

Continue reading “FDA Change to the “Abortion Pill” Overrated”

What on earth was the CIA doing putting plastic high explosive charges on schoolbuses and in hidden places in a Virginia public school in a “test” of K-9 dogs reportedly belonging to the Agency itself?

The story of the secret “test” broke because an alert mechanic doing a routine check on one of the Loudon County School District’s schoolbuses found a package of what turned out to be plastic explosive, packed in a plastic wrapper, jammed down in among some of the rubber hoses and electric wires around the engine. It had allegedly “fallen” from where it had originally been placed, was missed by the dogs and their handlers, and remained where it was stuck for two days, while the bus was unwittingly used to deliver some 26 young children to and from school on eight separate bus runs totaling 145 miles of driving.

I called the CIA’s “public information” office on Friday to ask for clarification as to why the CIA, which does not have a domestic policing function, would be operating, and testing, a K-9 bomb-detecting unit, given that such tasks in the US would normally be handled either by state and local police agencies, or by the FBI or the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). The office, though it was mid-day, was not answering its phones, and only had a voice mail recording, on which I identified myself as a reporter, left my contact information and requested a response on deadline. No surprise: I was not called back with an answer, and do not anticipate receiving one from an agency that is infamous for its secrecy. (The standard CIA response in my experience, when I’ve received one at all, is: “We have no response to that question.”)

Still, even for a notoriously opaque and obtuse government agency, this is a truly bizarre incident that cries out for answers.

Alert Virginia school district mechanic found C-4 explosive package planted on school bus in CIA "test"
 

If the goal is testing the ability of dogs to detect hidden explosives, there is no need to run that test in a real school and in the engine compartments of real buses that transport real children, or to place such charges, as the CIA also reportedly did, in hidden locations inside a real school building. (Actually, since what’s being tested is the dogs’ smelling ability, real C-4 wasn’t needed either — only objects that had been in placed in contact with the compound, or wrappers from the charges that would have carried the odor on them.) People may benefit in training exercises when the tests are tricked out to appear more real-life, but dogs don’t need that kind of reality-theater environment to hone or test their skills. Any old bus, or for that matter a rental truck, could have been used for the job. The engine compartment for a truck is exactly the same as for a bus, and dogs don’t care whether the body color of a vehicle being searched is yellow or not (they’re color-blind after all!), or whether it has a big box behind the cab, or two rows of seats. Ditto to using a functioning school building. Any building, including one of the CIA’s own buildings at its Langley headquarters, or on “The Farm” where agents are trained, would serve as well as a hiding place for explosive charges.

We were having a bad day in the asylum,
A bad 8 years, a bad sixteen years,
Oh, heck, a bad era,
Well, let’s face it, a bad history.
But we had a good leader for a change,
A guy from Vermont
With wild white hair,
An honest man
Who most people liked and trusted
Who openly talked about revolution.
 
We were all hurting,
Waiting for a sign.
Time was rushing by.
Days, weeks, months.
We were all serving life-sentences
Without parole,
That is, living in America.
Me in Vermont, you in Pennsylvania,
My good friend Tim in California. . .
And the feeling was ominous and ubiquitous.
 
Like a Stephen King novel.
There were distant mountains
Crumbling silently,
Occasionally a forest would fall down.
Bees were going extinct.
Japanese children were eating Minke whales in school.
The government was busily making tiny atom bombs.
But who knew what was real anyway?
Some of us had turned to prayer