Markos Moulitsas: It’s Time for Sanders to Drop Out

It's as though one day the whole town assembled in the square, and all the nobles and officials took the stage and threw off their masks. What a sight for the people — masks rising high into the air like a flock of birds rising from a tree (source; click to enlarge).

by Gaius Publius

Just passing this on. Markos Moulitsas, founder of Daily Kos and a Clinton supporter, sounds like he wants Sanders to leave the race now (note the text of the URL; my emphasis below):

Bernie Sanders went further this primary season than some might have imagined at the outset, but despite his significant accomplishments, his race to the White House is over. Democrats will head into November with Hillary Clinton as their standard-bearer to face off against Donald Trump (assuming he survives an attempted coup by his party’s establishment).

In short, there is no plausible route for Sanders to overcome the advantage Clinton enjoyed of 319 pledged delegates before Tuesday’s contests. Since the former first lady leads the pledged delegate race 58 percent to 42 percent, with roughly half of the delegates to take the nomination already allocated, Sanders would have to win nearly 60 percent of delegates in the remaining states just to tie her.

That’s just not going to happen. ...

(By the way, that March 15 Clinton lead has recently been adjusted downward, to 315. Today it's below 300. Sanders could easily knock it down by 100 delegates or more from its March 15 high going into New York. In other words, going into New York the lead could easily be less than 200, depending on the outcome of four caucus states, with lots of game after that still to be played.)

But back to Moulitsas. Aside from the fact that the rest of the map favors Sanders, that momentum shifts can sometimes be dramatic — which is why people play the whole game, not just the first half — and that Sanders wins even in "Clinton states" when you look at election-day voting results only (that is, after the "who is this guy?" early votes are subtracted out) ... despite all this, Moulitsas would like Sanders to leave. Yet he never tells us why, so we're left to wonder.

One consequence of Sanders quitting now, of course, would be to artificially swell Clinton's delegate total coming into the convention (making a nice story for the press and also reinforcing the "progressives can't win" narrative). Another would be to let her team "pivot to Trump" and also adjust her sales pitch to "moderate voters" now, instead of continuing to sell to left-leaning (and reform-minded) Sanders voters. A third would be to "disappear" the split in support for the Democratic Party, which has widened into a chasm. (Note that I said "disappear" the chasm, not close it.)

Still, we're left to guess his reason for wanting Sanders to quit, and I won't speculate. Moulitsas does issue a warning, however. It's at the end, and it starts like this:

Sanders is obviously free to stay in the race so long as his supporters keep funding his efforts. But no one should get angry when the rest of the party...

Can you finish that sentence? Stop and take a guess.

[Sanders can stay in the race, but] no one should get angry when the rest of the party ... what?

What would you imagine that warning is? Sanders supporters shouldn't get "angry" when ... what? I'll save you the click. It's not what you think. It's "...starts focusing on the Trump threat." In other words, no one should get "angry" when the Party ignores Sanders.

You're right to be confused by that. I was too. I think it would be a gift to the Sanders campaign if he were ignored by the Clinton campaign. Was that sentence, for a fleeting second, about to end differently? I guess we'll never know what the rest of it wanted to be, after the words "no one should get angry when..." were typed.

Would Pivoting to Trump Now Be a Winning Strategy for Clinton?

Would focusing on Trump now, before the primary is over, and pivoting today from more progressive policies ... would that be a solid primary-contest strategy? Would that even be a good strategy in the general election? I'm not sure Sanders supporters would welcome it. But if that's the Clinton plan, I guess we'll get to watch it play out in real time.

This is turning into quite the party-insiders vs. party-reformers battle isn't it. Nice to know who's standing where. I just hope that if those insiders do manage to swing the nomination to the insider candidate, they don't "get angry" themselves, but accept responsibility for the result they chose for themselves. Again, just passing this on.

Blue America has endorsed Bernie Sanders for president.

• Time to contribute?
• Time to phone-bank for Bernie?
• Time to make sure all of your friends come out to vote?

Seems so to me. And thanks!

GP
  

"Advice conservatives never give themselves," courtesy of Jen Sorensen (who levels a shocking accusation at Davy Brooks)

Jen Sorensen, Daily Kos Comics (click to enlarge)

by Ken

This strip is so wonderful that it hardly needs amplification or commentary, though I think you're going to enjoy it even more after you've read Jen's own background note (see below). And I'm going to go a step farther, extracting the pearls of conservative wisdom Jen has incorporated here, just so you can hear them in isolation, and let them rattle around your head a little. I'm also going to preempt a bit of Jen's note by revealing that, beyond the obvious starting point of the death of Sandra Bland, the formulation here and indeed the content of panels 2 through 4 are filtered through the, er, sensibility of America's Whiner, Davy Brooks.

You can, of course, go straight to the strip -- as you likely already have done. And if you want to accuse me of overexplaining the joke, I can accept that. Still, I think there's value in first hearing these dicta on their own. Feel free to adapt them mentally to the right-wing voices you cherish most.

1. You need to cut out the victim mentality.
2. You should be more respectful of authority.
3. You people are too angry. Lighten up!
4. When are you going to stop living in the past? Get over it!

Now do you see what I mean by adapting them to other right-wing voices? It really doesn't come as a great surprise to learn that the voice Jen was kind of hearing in her head was the seemingly moderate whine of our Davy B. Consider, though, how harsh, even scathing these pieces of "advice" would sound coming out of the mouth of Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly, to pick just a few examples. (I probably should have brought Noah in on this. He's a connoisseur of the kinds of diatribes I'm trying to imagine.)

Now look at the strip -- or if you already have, look at it again.

Finally, let's add Jen's own thoughts:

Some people blame Sandra Bland for escalating the situation during her traffic stop, suggesting she should have been more respectful to the barking, button-pushing officer. Funny how all this finger-wagging about manners when dealing with law enforcement didn't seem to apply when the person in question was Cliven Bundy, the freeloading rancher who put up armed resistance over paying grazing fees. Apparently rebellion is virtuous if you're a highly-armed white cowboy/militia leader/Tea Party activist/Jade Helm conspiracy theorist, but if you're a black woman who forgot to signal while changing lanes, do not even think about behaving ungraciously towards the authorities, no matter how abusive they are.

Other panels in this cartoon were somewhat inspired by a recent David Brooks column, which was written as an open letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates in response his new book. After professing what felt to me like patronizing faux humility, Brooks more or less lapsed into ye olde "why don't you stop wallowing in victimhood and pursue the American Dream?" spiel.

"Patronizing faux humility"? From our Davy? That's shocking! (Just kidding. Actually, if you look up "patronizing faux humility" in the dictionary, I think we all have a good idea whose picture you'll find there.)

"Patronizing faux humility"? From Davy Brooks? Can it be?

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It's too hard for U.S. media to keep track of people killed here by police, but The Guardian is managing to do it from the U.K.

A screenshot of the control panel of the Guardian interactive website that keeps track, as it says, of "People killed by police in the US" -- tallying, as of this afternoon, 470 nationwide year-to-date. Note that there's also a map view. (Click to enlarge.)

by Ken

"Can you imagine any entity in our so called free press doing something like this?" Johnny Morales asks in "The Guardian UK embarrasses All US Media but will we notice?," posting on Daily Kos as johnnyintexas. "This" is a comprehensive gathering of information about killings by the police in the U.S., viewable in list or map form and fully searchable by name, state, armed/unarmed, gender, age, race/ethnicity, and cause.

Johnny says he can't imagine it being done here, for the simplest imaginable reason: No one seems to have even tried to do it. Nothing, he says, has stood in the way of any U.S. media outlet doing it.

Yet until The Guardian did, we've been told that the Federal government doesn't keep track of this, local and state governments don't coordinate the data and as a result doing it was impossible for any American media to accomplish.

That they are doing so has been referenced in another diary as a source of data, but the focus of that diary was a specific set of data in a companion project covering police killings from 2012-2015.

To the extent that U.S. media have even given attention to the idea of such a project, it has been written off as "impossible to accomplish since there are no central reporting structures to ask." Apparently, though, the data was available for the asking, provided somebody bothered to do the asking. The fact that it took a British newspaper to do so, says Johnny -- and it managed the feat "without turning over heaven and earth" -- "really should embarrass our own media, all of it. Even our most Liberal entities never have seemed to gather themselves up to do the same thing."

Here, by the way, is the record to date for June (same link; again, click to enlarge):



"I think Kudos are in order for The Guardian," says Johnny.

They proved a point I believe to be truer than ever which is if you want honest reporting on what is happening in the USA, you need to read foreign news outlets. Who instead are report on events here like our media seems to relish reporting on events elsewhere (because things are so peachy keen in the USA).

Of course, I don't expect anyone in our media will be embarrassed.

Instead they will utterly ignore this, and hope by doing so so few Americans realize what's being done by a foreign media outlet to inform them, that it will fail to gain traction and be forgotten once they are done.

At the very least we should spread the word and encourage anyone who doesn't know about what The Guardian is doing to visit and learn the details that up to now our own media all of them said was beyond their abilities to obtain.

One other thing you'll be grateful for when you visit the Guardian website: no fund-raising appeal.

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Is Obama Going To Continue Making The Federal Judiciary Overly Friendly To Corporate Criminals?

When's the last time we asked you to sign a petition? Right… never. But our friends at Daily Kos are offering the kind of strategic initiative that appeals to us. They want progressives to express their frustration with President Obama's tendency to fill the judiciary with corporate lawyers. It's been making a lot of us sick? Not you? Did you know that just over 70% of President Obama's judicial nominees have been corporate lawyers? And less than 4% have been public interest lawyers… just 10 since he was inaugurated in 2009!

Their petition to the President is short and to the point:

Every day we learn about the multiple ways large corporations are destroying democracy in this country. It is time to stop nominating corporate lawyers to the federal bench, and to instead nominate qualified public interest lawyers.

As Kos activist Paul Hogarth put it, "If you want to know how we got awful court decisions like Citizens United, "it’s because we have too many corporate lawyers on the judiciary. And we need to level the playing field."

George W. Bush was the first president to appoint a Chief Justice since Reagan elevated Nixon appointee William Rehnquist in 1986. Years earlier Rehnquist had served as a GOP polling thug in Phoenix whose job was to intimidate Hispanic-Americans and prevent them from voting. What better choice for Chief Justice? When he finally joined Satan in Hell, Bush nominated John Roberts (2005), a corporate hack from the white shoe DC firm Hogan and Hartson (now Hogan Lovells, which represents every kind of criminal predator on the face of the earth, from pharmaceutical conglomerates and banksters to murderous dictatorships). Lawyers from these kinds of firms don't have the same kind of moral compass that normal people have. Completely unfit to serve, he was confirmed on September 29, 2005 78-22, half the Democrats joining every Republican to back him. Among the Democrats still in the Senate who voted for him back then were Tom Carper, Tim Johnson, Mary Landrieu, Pat Leahy, Carl Levin, Patty Murray, Bill Nelson, Mark Pryor, Jay Rockefeller, and Ron Wyden. Most progressives voted NO (as did then-Senator Barack Obama). No Roberts, no Citizens United? He was sure a force behind that anti-democracy ruling, something the senators who voted to confirm him should be helped accountable for. Hard to imagine that the same Obama who had the good sense to vote against confirming John Roberts has nominated Georgia right-wing extremist Michael Boggs.

One thing that has most cheered me politically in recent months is the tumultuous reception-- by normal people, not political types or the media folks who regurgitate their press releases and talking points-- that voters have given too independent progressive Marianne Williamson in CA-33. The first legit opportunity to break the two-Beltway-party monopoly since Bernie Sanders pulled it off in Vermont. And, yes Democrats fought and denigrated Bernie in Vermont the same way they're fighting and denigrating Marianne here in L.A. The love trying to paint her as a "New Age guru," something less than serious. Yeah, less serious than "ex"-Republican hack Wendy Greuel? Here are some of the statements Marianne has made about why she's running. Do you think she'll be rubber-stamping any corporatist moves Obama makes in his last two years in office?

The biggest threat to our country today is not from armies invading our shores. The biggest threat to our democracy is not bombs falling from the sky over an American city. No, our biggest threat is a pattern of a thousand cuts-- the slow but now constant chipping away at our democratic freedoms-- one capitulation to moneyed interests at a time, one politically gerrymandered district at a time, one government surveillance program at a time, one limiting of our voting rights at a time, one intimidation of journalists at a time, one Patriot Act at a time, one National Defense Authorization Act at a time, one Trans Pacific Partnership so-called trade deal limiting our sovereignty at a time. So at what point-- after how many moments when Americans mutter to ourselves “Ya gotta be kidding me!”-- do we stand up to our own government and say, “Hey, guys! Whose side are you on??”

…I am running for Congress because I believe America has gone off the democratic rails. A toxic brew of shrinking civil liberties, expanded corporate influence and domestic surveillance is poisoning our democracy.

We are currently in the process of dismantling the most basic social contract between the American people and our government, as "a government of the people, by the people, and for the people" has transitioned before our eyes into "a government of a few of the people, by a few of the people, and for a few of the people." A purpose of American progress is to expand the democratic franchise, not constrict it. Yet today, that franchise is being narrowed for everyone. The American people now need to defend our country against a hostile takeover by multi-national corporate interests.

…The undue influence of money on our politics is the issue underlying all other issues, and we need a national movement supporting a Constitutional Amendment outlawing the undue influence of money on our politics. If elected, I will work with those in and outside Congress who are working on this already-- for I feel, as many people do, that getting money out of politics is the greatest moral challenge of our generation.

The polar opposite of a DCCC mystery meat candidate, who is forbidden from putting anything substantive on a website, on Marianne's official campaign website, there's a page called Democracy At Risk. It starts with a quote from Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis-- no Clarence Thomas or John Roberts: “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

Democracy itself is at risk today, fiercely assaulted by combined forces of money and power. This assault is in my view our single largest challenge – the issue underlying all other issues.

This organized, well-funded assault seeks the destruction of our bedrock democratic foundations: voting rights; fair representation; and the principle of one person, one vote. Voter suppression laws being passed throughout the country violate our voting rights. Politically driven gerrymandering, making a shift from voters choosing winners to winners choosing voters, violates the principle of fair representation. And Citizens United has substituted the formula of one dollar, one vote for the democratic principle of one person, one vote.

A solid drift in the direction of the financial dominance of our politics-- aided and abetted, indeed led in some cases, by our own Supreme Court-- now threatens to overpower our democracy. In fact, contrary to recent Supreme Court rulings, money is not speech and corporations are not people. The citizens of a democracy have the right to organize around ideas and not just money. Yet, money dangerously controls not only our politics but even our discussion of political issues.

We need a state by state rejection of politicized gerrymandering (California has joined Iowa and Florida in starting this process). We need a Constitutional Amendment to override Citizens United to make way for public financing of our political campaigns, and possibly an Amendment as well to guarantee every citizen the right to vote. In addition, we need to repeal the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that gave permission for media cross-ownership and helped tear down the firewall between journalism and corporate promotion. Once the distribution of our news became controlled by a relatively few corporate entities, our society’s political conversation became narrowed to a dangerous degree. The narrowing of our political options inevitably followed.

These issues are the cornerstones of any serious effort to reclaim our democracy.

If this is anything to go by, the latest addition to the DailyKos comics lineup looks OK

Mark Fiore

"Tea Bag -- because other languages are just too hard!"

by Ken

Yesterday on DailyKos Markos introduced the latest addition to the DK Comics lineup (updating my last post on the subject), Mark Fiore:

You may have already seen Mark Fiore's animated work at its home base at SFGate.com [with a sample included onsite].

You may have heard about him when this piece [meaning the "Learn to Speak Tea Bag" piece I've put up top] elicited howls of protests from the teabaggers while Bill O'Reilly blew a fuse.

You may have heard about Fiore when some pigheaded person at Apple declined his iPhone app because it "ridicule(d) public figures" (and it does!). Apple later reversed its decision.

And you may have heard about Fiore when he became the first animated and online-only cartoonist to win the Pulitzer Prize.

Markos even gets off a pretty good quip after running through the DK comics lineup as it now stands: "Tom Tomorrow's This Modern World on Mondays, Jen Sorensen's Slowpoke on Wednesdays, Mark Fiore on Thursday, Matt Bors on Fridays, and Eric Lewis' Animal Nuz on Saturday."

As I read those names, Fiore, Bors, Sorensen, Tomorrow, Lewis, I'm filled with gratitude that I'm a liberal. Because if I was a conservative, I'd have to pretend that Mallard Filmore was funny.

I just looked at today's Slowpoke, "Tax Evasion Funnies," and I'm still not getting Jen Sorensen. Ditto Matt Bors's Friday outing, "Bin Laden's Porn Collection." (Hmm, suddenly Mallard Filmore isn't looking so ridiculous.) I'll try to remember to check out Fiore tomorrow, though.

I always try to remember to check out the incomparable Tom Tomorrow, but I forget a lot. For the benefit of other forgetters, here's Monday's strip:

The Slow Boil

[Don't forget to click to enlarge.]

FINALLY, FOR THE BENEFIT OF THOSE WHO LIKE ME
CAN'T FIND DK COMICS WITHOUT DOING A SEARCH --

Let's all try to remember the URL: comics.dailykos.com. Shouldn't be that difficult to remember, wouldn't you think?

Still, it seems kind of crazy to me that there isn't any obvious link -- at least not obvious enough for me to find -- on the DK home page.

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If you look up "irony" in the dictionary, you will find a picture of . . . well, of WHOM? Yes, ladies and germs, it's another famous DWT News Quiz!

Kudos to Steve Benen for nailing this one on his Carpetbagger Report ("Juan Williams defines 'journalist'").

Steve notes that NPR's Juan Williams--a former Fox Noise "analyst," you may recall--had a powerfully negative response to Newsweek's announcement that Markos Moulitsas, creator of Daily Kos, will be contributing commentary on the 2008 presidential election to both the magazine and its website (naturally he'll be "balanced" by a rabidly conservative voice to be named later):

[T]he fact is that he’s not a journalist in terms of someone who knows how to do reporting, someone who reflects balance in what he portrays. To the contrary, he engages in the kind of hyperbole and extreme statements that’s represented by that crass and, I think, offensive statement he made about those dead people.

But you know what? I think that’s just what’s going on in journalism. I think that, you know, there’s more and more opinion, less and less people who know how to do the job. All you’ve got to do is shout, say something on the blog that offends and attacks the other side, and suddenly, you have the credentials, and you’re said to be a journalist. I think it’s a great lie.

Now, this is pretty dopey in its own right, and Steve picks it apart well, but only after pausing to relish the irony of it all. Said irony has to do with the circumstances in which "Scoop" Williams made these remarks. And that, to me, has "news quiz" written all over it. So let's make this an impromptu DWT "Nerds in the News" Quiz:

To whom and where did Juan Williams deliver this manifesto on journalism?

(a) To Bill Moyers [right] in an interview on his PBS Moyers Report

(b) To CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric, who was in Washington for a pot-luck supper at David Broder's house

(c) To Sean Hannity in an interview on Fox Noise

(d) To Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, as the justice was autographing a copy of his vitriolic new tell-little-of-consequence memoir, Confronting the Future, at the pot-luck supper at David Broder's house

(e) To FEMA Acting Deputy Administrator Harvey Johnson [left], the guy who had that supposed "press conference" where the softball-lobbing questioners were all FEMA employees, whom he addressed by their first names [hey, did you see Al Kamen's hilarious recap of this priceless imbroglio in yesterday's Washington Post "In the Loop" column?]

(f) To former New York Times diplomatic affairs correspondent Judy Miller, his charades partner at the pot-luck supper at David Broder's house, after they lost a round to the team of syndicated columnist Robert Novak and former vice presidential enforcer Irving "Lewis" Libby



AND THE ANSWER IS . . .

Of course, it's the loudest and dumbest mouth in the whole of the Right-Wing Noise Machine:

Sean "Nuclear-Waste Mouth" Hannity!


SCORING

If you picked (c), you have a perfect score of 100.

However, if you picked (b), (d), or (f), you're alarmingly out of the loop--the Beltway loop, that is. "A pot-luck supper at David Broder's house"? Come on, puh-leeze! What ever would Sally Quinn say about that?

You're going to need to read a few hundred Broder columns in quick succession. Don't try this on an empty stomach, though--or on a full one either, come to think of it.


BREAKING NEWS--NEWSWEEK NAMES MARKOS'S RIGHT-WING COMMENTATING COUNTERPART, AND IT IS . . .

Howard Kurtz has the story.

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Do FDL and the other progressive blogs frighten Bush rubber-stampers like Susan Collins precisely because of their dedication to principle?

I just wanted to join Howie (see below--and note the update with Firedoglake's public statement) in registering astonishment at the bizarre attack launched by the campaign of Maine's Sen. Susan Collins, apparently increasingly desperate about her reelection prospects, against a cadre of progressive blogs. They're such different entities, but all in their ways irreplaceable. DailyKos gave us a gathering place for a true marketplace of ideas. The MoveOn "family of organizations" do heroic jobs of spearheading public awareness of crucial issues and of manning the virtual trenches of political organizing.

Most mystifying, surely, is the grotesquely sexist as well as plug-ignorant attack on Firedoglake. The imbecile who wrote it either has never actually looked at the site or is too dim to understand the work being done there by our friend Jane Hamsher's remarkable team. I don't want to mention any other names, for fear of leaving deserving people out, but Jane can take a bow as the ringleader who assembled this group of (yes) brilliant women but also remarkably able men.

I wonder if the reason the attack on Firedoglake seems so utterly inexplicable may in fact explain the virulence of the attack. The FDL people are known as being not just really, really smart, but fiercely principled, hard-working, and incorruptible. If you were a low-grade P.R. flack for a sad political hack like Senator Collins, wouldn't that kind of passion and principle frighten you too? It's deeply offensive to the corporatist thugs and ideological primitives who justify such slugs' existence.

As far as I know, the lunk who wrote this nonsense is still employed by the Collins campaign. If you want to send that campaign the kind of message such people understand, the dollars-and-cents kind, check out Howie's post for information on contributing to the campaign of the senator's outstanding Democratic opponent, Rep. Tom Allen.

When the Collins "brain trust" imported Holy Joe Lieberman as a campaign weapon, smart progressives turned him into a secret weapon, a really big-time fund-raiser--for Tom Allen! The way things are going, it looks like every time the senator opens her mouth or her campaign issues a fatwa, it's going to be money in the bank for Allen.

And you might want to stop by firedoglake.com and give the ladies and gents there a hug. They're only human.