The Clintons And Their Machine Define Political Dishonesty

Hillary's in a trap of her own making. As exit poll after exit poll has shown, Democratic primary voters for whom truthfulness and trustworthiness are decisive ballot motivators, are casting 'em for Bernie, not her. Her campaign is built on lies and built on the old style politics of deception that 2016 voters are disgusted with. Hillary Clinton is Rahm Emanuel. Hillary Clinton is Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Hillary Clinton is everything that high-info Democratic voters detest about their own party. And she and her advisors have a plan to make it even worse by tearing the Democratic Party apart in her new sewer strategy. And aside from that, no one likes being lied to and played for a fool.

But she can't stop any sooner than she could stop breathing. It's who she is as a political entity who lived side by side with the man who wagged his finger at the camera and said he did not have sex with that woman, implying that oral sex isn't really sex. I'm sorry to say it, but, historically, that scene and the catastrophe of NAFTA will be the defining moments of Bill Clinton's presidency. Her own pattern of lies and deception have been apparent all through this campaign against Bernie.

Gov. Peter Shumlin foolishly endorsed Hillary against Vermont's own wildly popular U.S. Senator. Vermont voters didn't care who Shumlin wanted them to vote for in the primary. On March 7 Shumlin's congenital liar of a candidate won 18,335 votes (13.6%) in that state's primary. Bernie won 115,863 votes (86.1%). Schumlin is a super-delegate for Hillary though. This week though, he couldn't just sit back and watch her lying about his state in her ugly, ruthless bid to capture the White House and trample and eviscerate anything standing in her way. Watch him on local TV station WCAX:

WCAX.COM Local Vermont News, Weather and Sports-

Hillary Clinton is apparently getting desperate, as after seeming to exhaust all other options, she’s returning to the original line of attack against Bernie Sanders: gun control.

“She said that it’s going to be coming out in the very near future that many of the catastrophes that have taken human lives in the State of New York have been the product of guns coming over the border from Vermont,” according to New York State Sen. Tim Kennedy. “That’s the first I heard it,” he remarked.

That’s probably because it’s not even close to true.

Out of the 7,686 firearms recovered and traced in New York in 2014, only 55 were first purchased in Vermont, according to the ATF. In 2013, that number was 61 out of 8,539. As such, Vermont accounts for less than 1% of the total guns traced in either year, despite Vermont bordering New York.

Meanwhile, 395 guns were sourced to Virginia in 2014, and 423 in 2013. The New York Times wrote an in-depth report that showed the vast majority of guns used in New York City actually come from Southern states via I-95, in a system they dubbed “The Iron Pipeline.”

Nevertheless, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook repeated the bogus attack on CNN.

“I don’t think Senator Sanders is being sincere here in New York, which is facing serious problems with guns being trafficked from Vermont and other states,” he claimed.

Gov. Peter Shumlin of Vermont, an outspoken Clinton supporter and a superdelegate pledged to support her, didn’t hesitate to throw her under the bus for her callous mischaracterization of his state. “It is campaign season; therefore, things are sometimes said by all the candidates that sometimes aren’t entirely accurate,” he said. He went on to note that heroin used in Vermont is primarily brought over from other states, New York in particular.

However, this failed attack by the Clinton campaign seems to have only been a false start on what is emerging as the latest coordinated campaign against the Vermont senator.

Jeff Zeleny, senior Washington correspondent for CNN, was with the Clinton campaign as the news of Sanders’ Wisconsin came in, and he described a Clinton campaign staff that was “running out of patience.”

“They’re going to be deploying a new strategy. It’s going to be called ‘disqualify him,’ ‘defeat him,’ and they can unify the party later,” he explained. “Now they’re going to go headlong into him, I’m told, beginning here in the New York primary on his gun record, among other things.”

Sure enough, the dust had not even settled on Wisconsin’s results before the new line of attack was being megaphoned by media outlets, with the New York Daily News featuring Sanders on tomorrow’s front page, attacking his record on gun control.

Bernie Sanders received a “D-” rating from the NRA based on his voting record.

And Hillary's own record on guns? Opportunistic and all over the map depending on who the audience was she was trying to impress. She's been pro-gun when that was politically expedient and anti-gun when that's been politically expedient. She's inauthentic and has no political values. Her defining statement about herself-- as she was turning 50 and talking to a radio audience on NPR is "I feel like my political beliefs are rooted in the conservatism that I was raised with... I'm very proud that I was a Goldwater Girl." Obviously. Unfortunately for Clinton, character matters to New York voters, as she's about to find out.

Vermont-- First Out Of The Gate In The Race For Medicare For All

Yesterday Gov. Peter Shumlin of Vermont signed a single-payer health care bill into law, the first of it's kind in the U.S.

Legislators say the plan, approved by the Democratic controlled House and Senate this spring, aims to extend coverage to all 620,000 residents while containing soaring health care costs.

A key component establishes a state health benefits exchange, as mandated by new federal health care laws, that will offer coverage from private insurers, state-sponsored and multi-state plans. It also will include tax credits to make premiums affordable for uninsured Vermonters.

The exchange, called Green Mountain Care and managed by a five-member board, will set reimbursement rates for health care providers and streamline administration into a single, unified system.

Residents and small employers will be able to compare rates from the various plans and enroll for coverage of their choosing.

As designed, the goal is an eventual state-funded and operated single-payer system. ... Advocates of change say the existing fee-for-service care has a financial incentive to deliver more care, such as tests, with little attention to quality or better outcomes.

The single-payer concept was omitted from the federal health care overhaul championed by President Barack Obama, in part due to Republican criticism it meant excessive government control.

Progressives in Vermont, including Shumlin and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent, have worked for years to modify the state's health care system.

...If the state secures one key federal waiver related to exchanges, Green Mountain Care could begin as early as 2014. Another waiver needed to implement the single-payer component under federal law would not be available until 2017.

Vermont's plan calls for the board to consider the likely costs of coverage, factor in potential savings from reforms and recommended sources of revenue. It is charged with delivering a financing plan to legislators by 2013.

If that plan's single-payer component is adopted, lawmakers would approve a budget annually.

Single-payer proponents say the present system is too expensive and excludes too many residents. Vermont has around 47,000 uninsured and 150,000 underinsured residents.

Even Mitt Romney likes it and says he supports Vermont's single payer plan. As Vermont's state government moves to aggressively better the lives of the people there, it stands in the starkest of contrasts to the governor and legislature of Wisconsin, virtually a fascist-controled government inside our national borders. As we've seen over the last few weeks, Wisconsin has taken a leading role on behalf of American oligarchs in every scheme there is to deal body blows to working families and immobilize democracy itself. Wednesday the editorial board of the New York Times suggested to Democrats that to beat the GOP in 2012 there is a lot of work to do beyond just pointing to Paul Ryan and yelling that the Republicans want to kill Medicare, which, of course, they always have. "It’s a useful reminder of the vast differences between the parties," they opined, "but defines only the Republicans, not the Democrats."

Sooner or later, Democrats will have to admit that Medicare cannot keep running as it is-- its medical costs are out of control, and a recent report showed its trust fund running out of money in 2024, five years earlier than expected. Bill Clinton was right on Wednesday to warn his party that it must bring down those costs if it is to have any credibility on the deficit and the economy.

Many Republicans are ruefully admitting that the House went much too far in passing the Ryan plan last month. Hypnotized by their own rhetoric, firmly believing that the 2010 elections gave them a mandate to dismantle essential programs rather than raise taxes on the rich, House Republicans approved a budget that went far beyond the comfort level of the nation’s center. On Wednesday, five Republicans refused to support the Ryan plan in a symbolic vote in the Senate.

But not all Medicare cuts are the same. Democrats don’t like to admit this, but President Obama’s health care law reduces Medicare spending by more than $500 billion through 2019. This is done mostly by reducing the increases in payments to providers and cutting Medicare Advantage plans. After the law was passed, Mr. Obama proposed reducing health costs even more sharply. The subject is so confusing to voters that Republicans have used these cuts to suggest that everyone wants to cut Medicare. That’s why Nancy Pelosi prefers a more simplistic pitch: “We have a plan. It’s called Medicare.”

At some point in the next year, Democrats will have to do better than that. They can start by defending their cuts and clearly differentiating them from Mr. Ryan’s extreme plan, which makes the program unrecognizable. It might require, as Mr. Clinton put it, giving up some short-term political gain, but voters might also appreciate a dose of honesty and realism in their political diet.

Or, they can do the inevitable and the only real answer... start moving towards single-payer the way Vermont has. That's what the Democrats should campaign on in 2012: Single Payer For All. I spoke with New Mexico state Senator Eric Griego last night. He had just come home from meeting with a group of Albuquerque physicians to discuss a more sensible health care system. "Rather than targeting Medicare for cuts," he told me, "we should be building on it and making it available to more if not all Americans. 'Medicare 2.0' as some call it, would reduce administrative costs, increase access and affordability and put patients before profits. More Members of Congress should sign on to legislation like H.R. 676-- the Medicare for All bill that I plan to co-sponsor if elected to Congress." Blue America is targeting this race as one of the best chances anywhere in America to elect a real-deal progressive leader-- on health care and across the board. If the Memorial Day Weekend is a good time for you to contribute, you can find Eric's campaign here.