October 1, 2015

Bernie: 1,300,000 donations from 650,000 people.

Of course Bernie can win.

Mostly small donors who are willing to donate again if needed.

September 30, 2015

Bernie, Hillary, NEA. Somebody's not telling the truth.

Clinton endorsement divides teachers union

Subtitle: State officials and rank-and-file members plan to protest upcoming vote to endorse Hillary Clinton.

When it comes to the national NEA endorsement, however, Sanders’ campaign told POLITICO it did not get the same consideration from union officials as Clinton.

“There was recently a phone interview that was arranged for Secretary Clinton with their board of directors,” said a Sanders campaign official. “That was never offered to us.” An NEA spokesman did not respond to a request for comment about the phone interview.

But the spokesman said that Clinton, Sanders and O’Malley have all met in person with NEA’s president. And on July 2, the NEA reached out to the three campaigns to invite them to participate in a tele-town hall with members. They said Sanders never responded. “After multiple attempts, the campaign failed to respond to our efforts to schedule a time and date for this tele-town hall during the back to school period. Sec. Clinton was the only campaign to respond,” the spokesman said. Sanders’ campaign refuted that claim.

The Sander's campaign says differently.

"Our national field director, Phil Fiermonte, had conversations with the NEA's political director, Carrie Pugh, on more than one occasion and discussed possible dates for a tele-town hall with the senator," Sanders spokesman Michael Briggs said. "To say the Sanders' campaign 'failed to respond' is simply not true. In fact, a request by the Sanders campaign to allow the senator the same opportunity as Mrs. Clinton to speak with the NEA's board of directors was denied."[/blockquote

I predicted earlier that the NEA would endorse Hillary Clinton.

The money from the education "reformers" is vital to unions, it seems.

NEA remains faithful to Gates' funding.

NEA doesn’t directly receive the Gates funding. The NEA Foundation does.

...NEA and the NEA Foundation are two peas, same pod. The NEA Foundation is supported in part via NEA membership dues, and Garcia sits on the NEA Foundation board of directors.

Gates money to the NEA Foundation is Gates money to NEA. For example, consider these two July 2013 NEA Foundation grants:

Date: July 2013
Purpose: to support a cohort of National Education Association Master Teachers in the development of Common Core-aligned lessons in K-5 mathematics and K-12 English Language Arts
Amount: $3,882,600

Date: July 2013
Purpose: to support the capacity of state NEA affiliates to advance teaching and learning issues and student success in collaboration with local affiliates
Amount: $2,446,500

This $6.3 million was paid to the NEA Foundation but directed toward NEA members/affiliates.

The charter school views of Hillary Clinton are well-known, the Democrats have been strongly in favor. Education reform has advanced rapidly under a Democratic administration.

Bernie's education views are not really known yet. He supports public education, I know.

So it's safer for teachers' unions to go with the known.

I think though that members will give their votes to the candidate of their choice no matter who is endorsed.

I would just love to find out who is being honest about the tele-town hall.

September 27, 2015

"Today, We Are All Walter Mondale". Democrats learned the wrong lesson from 1984.

America’s anti-liberal myth: Why Dems learned the wrong lesson from 1984

Your calendar says it’s 2015, but it’s always 1984 in mind of the New Dems. These are the economically conservative Democrats that include centrists like the old Democratic Leadership Council, Third Way and financial sector-centric elected Democrats (plus Robert Rubin, the Rubin-launched Hamilton Project and associated advisers on the policy side). As always, they are again invoking 1984 to conjure images of a grave danger to Democrats’ ability to win elections in the form of ascendant progressive populism.

The New Dems’ scare story goes something like this: In 1984 Walter Mondale lost 49 states because he ran as a Super Liberal. Democrats would have kept losing if the New Dems had not formed to take control of and steer the party. In 1992 Bill Clinton ran as Centrist Man and Democrats started winning elections again. Now, economic progressives who prioritize other things before Wall Street’s approval are causing trouble. If these progressives Democrats represent the party it will again be banished to the political wilderness and forced to relearn the lesson of the ’80s and ’90s.

This premise is not only wrongheaded, in important ways it’s backwards.

Al From and friends got to push ahead with their conclusion that it was all the fault of liberals. They had the money and the circle of influence to do it.

Today, We Are All Walter Mondale

The hits keep coming. In more recent years New Dems have tried to apply the 1984 “lesson” to whatever political moment they’re in. Before declaring itself the New DLC (because in their mind the word “new” is some kind of magic incantation) and then ultimately folding and giving way to Third Way, the DLC tarred Democrats with the pejorative “member of the unelectable Mondale wing.” The trait that earned a Democrat this label circa 2003 was opposition to the Iraq war, a sin no Democrat with serious future national aspirations could commit lest they consign themselves to irrevocable Not President status. Anyone who would have suggested to the DLC that the next Democrat to win the White House would be a Hyde Park State Senator named Barack Obama elected in large part because of his opposition to the Iraq war would have been met with all sorts of political spectrum positioning-based derision.

They put that negative label on liberals not because liberals and progressives were wrong...but because they wanted the big money.

... What they have done is, on a number of instances, shamelessly changed their rationale for why elected Democrats need to do what Third Way’s donors wanted Democrats to do. They do this because New Dems organizations like Third Way are not on a mission to get Democrats to win elections. They’re on a mission to lock Democrats into serving high finance, even at the expense of winning elections. The New Dems are not acting out of concern that progressive populist Democrats will lose. They don’t want liberals to win.

Once money and funding became the goal of those who were pulling the party's strings....winning and losing was just a side issue.

Thus all their calls for "bipartisanship", and this one..."post partisanship". That last one means beyond the level of a 2 party system.

I don't think a nation can function well without the checks and balances of at least two parties.

September 25, 2015

Al From's group wanted a "bloodless revolution" in our Democratic Party.

Al From in his recent book, The New Democrats Return to Power, indicated that their group was formed to take over the party's policy.

He went further, even proclaiming they could take over the party. In many ways they did. This is sort of Part 2 of It's Al From’s Democratic Party, we just live here.

The DLC group is sometimes portrayed as a pro-Wall Street set of lobbyists. And From did recruit hedge fund legends like Michael Steinhardt to fund his movement. But to argue these people were corrupt or motivated by a pay to play form of politics is wrong. From is clearly a reformer and an ideologue, and his colleagues believed they were serving the public interest. “Make no mistake about it,” wrote From in a memo about his organization’s strategy, “what we hope to accomplish with the DLC is a bloodless revolution in our party." It is not unlike what the conservatives accomplished in the Republican Party during the 1960s and 1970s

I disagree with Stoller on one point for sure. I do not believe From's colleagues believed or even cared if they were serving the public interest. I believe funding and profit were their main goals.

We can thank them for the trade deals that have taken many jobs overseas. Al From was really firm on Bill Clinton supporting NAFTA. Notice he wants to "beat" organized labor. What kind of Democrat does that? A New Democrat.

As From wrote in a memo to Clinton in his first term, “Of all the opportunities you have this fall, NAFTA presents the greatest. Passing NAFTA can make your presidency. NAFTA presents both an economic and political opportunity…I can’t tell you how much better it would make your life and how much it would strengthen your presidency for you to beat (David) Bonior and organized labor on NAFTA. That would reestablish presidential leadership in the Democratic Party, something that hasn’t happened since 1966.”

From had an institutionalist perspective on NAFTA. He believed in free trade, but he also believed in Presidential primacy over the legislature. '“Politically, a victory on NAFTA would assert your leadership over your own party by making it clear that you, not the Democratic leadership in Congress or the interest groups, set the Democratic Party’s agenda on matters of real national importance.” You can hear echoes of Obama, and the broad Democratic party, in its collective disdain towards Congress. That is one consequence of From’s revolution, a shift of legitimacy away from the legislature.

From worked with Bob Rubin, Bill Daley, and Rahm Emanuel to run a campaign to pass NAFTA. Since rolling labor and crushing the left was his favorite activity, From jumped into this feet first. He registered as a lobbyist, talked to members on the Hill, and traveled nationwide to do public and media events on behalf of the agreement. It worked, and in his view, set the stage for the rest of Clinton’s term

I question the wisdom of having a contest between Congress and the President on purpose.

More from Al From's piece about his book at The Atlantic last year.

Recruiting Bill Clinton

Subtitle:

How the New Democrats recruited a leader and saved the party after three devastating Republican routs

I have to disagree with Al From about the subtitle. We have had other devastating losses in the most recent years. How does he explain that? His DLC advocates are still in firm control of the party apparatus, so how do they explain these losses.

In this article Al From tells of how they got started on changing the party. Their think tank formed their own think tank called the Progressive Policy Institute. Al From named it Progressive because, in his own words, he was tired of his group being called conservative.

To bring about real change in the Democratic Party, the Democratic Leadership Conference, which we had founded in 1985 to expand the party's base and appeal to moderates and liberals—had to become a national political movement. That required two things.

First, we needed an intellectual center, because without a candidate to rally around, we needed a set of compelling ideas. Just as it was clear that we needed to paint the mural, it was also clear that we needed to beef up our capacity to paint it. We needed more substantive help. We needed a political think tank with the capacity to develop politically potent, substantive ideas that our elected officials and political supporters could embrace. In January 1989, we created the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI).

Hard to argue they did succeed in setting policy for the party.

This article from last month by the Progressive Policy Institute tells how President Obama worked on getting the TPP passed.

New Democrats plan ‘assertive’ new presence in House

But a group of pro-business Democrats, who allied with President Barack Obama and Republicans to pass landmark trade legislation, are angling to cut more deals with the GOP and White House as a way to assert themselves — and force the Democratic Caucus to the center.

Led by Rep. Ron Kind of Wisconsin, the New Democrat Coalition of some 50 members sees opportunities this fall on taxes, trade, Medicare and government spending. Those are all areas where House Republicans have struggled to fashion 218-vote majorities from within their own party, with a cadre of restive conservatives often rejecting leadership’s compromises with Senate Democrats and Obama.

“We need to reconstitute the center of American politics again, on both sides. That is a crucial role we have to play, especially when it comes to the economic message and what resonates in those competitive districts,” Kind said in a recent interview.

Moderates are tired of being overshadowed in a party where liberals have long dominated the agenda, even as Democrats slipped further into the House minority after the 2014 midterm elections. They’ve accused the White House and party leaders of focusing too much on niche economic issues like the minimum wage and pay equity — policies, moderates argue, that turn off suburban voters Democrats need if they want to take back the House. And top Democratic leaders have released them to break with the party’s liberal base, in many cases an acknowledgement that many moderates come from tightly contested districts.

Early returns have been positive.

When needed support from his own party to pass landmark trade legislation, he turned to the New Democrat Coalition. The group mustered just enough votes — 28 in total — to clear fast-track trade authority through Congress, despite opposition from the party’s left, including Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of California. It was the latest — and most controversial — instance of the group flexing its muscles.

I disagree with above statement about liberals controlling the agenda. Can't remember a time when we did that. Maybe before my time.

In his article linked above, Recruiting Bill Clinton, Al From tells why they felt they needed someone like Bill Clinton. He quotes from Clinton's words:

He was not afraid to challenge old orthodoxies. In the early 1980s, long before I knew him, he and Hillary Clinton pushed cutting-edge education reforms, like pay for performance and public-school choice, against the opposition of the powerful Arkansas Education Association. Speaking about education in his Philadelphia speech, Clinton said the Democratic Party was “good at doing more. We are not so good at doing things differently, and doing them better, particularly when we have to attack the established ideas and forces which have been good to us and close to us. We are prone, I think, to programmatic solutions as against those which change structure, reassert basic values or make individual connections with children.”

Some "established ideas" that have been under attack for a while are Social Security and public schools.

From's writing indicates the group believed they were deciding policy for the party even back in the early 90s.

Nearly a year after our Little Rock meeting, at the DLC’s Annual Conference in New Orleans on March 24, 1990, Bill Clinton became the DLC’s fourth chairman. Calling Clinton a “rising star in three decades,” Sam Nunn passed him the gavel. Nunn quipped that when the DLC was created “we were viewed as a rump group. Now we’re viewed as the brains of the party. In just five years, we’ve moved from one end of the donkey to the other.”

I noticed some interesting quotes from Amazon reviews about From's book from December 2013, The New Democrats and the Return to Power.

Al From redefined centrist politics and provided the ideas and organization to move the Democrats from opposition to government, showing progressives across the world how to be principled, modern and in power. (Tony Blair, former prime minister of the United Kingdom)

I always wished I could be as smart as Al, and this book shows why. He shows what it was really like to be present at the creation of a movement that would take the Democrats from the wilderness to the White House, forever changing the course of American political history. This is a book about ideas as much as the people who forged them into a winning strategy, and it should be read, re-read and underlined by anyone who wants to know what it takes to be successful in American politics today. (Rahm Emanuel, Mayor of Chicago and former White House Chief of Staff)

Before 1992, the Democratic Party had moved too far to the left to win national elections. Too little credit is given to Al From, whose book tells the story of how he helped move his party back toward the common sense center. (Haley Barbour, former governor of Mississippi)

The American business community owes a big debt of gratitude to Al From. With vision and persistence he helped lead a major political party back to the principles of private sector growth, trade, jobs, personal responsibility, and fiscal stability. This book proves that the political center can win politically and govern effectively. Both parties -- and the American people -- would be wise to learn from Al's inspiring story. (Thomas J. Donohue, President & CEO, U.S. Chamber of Commerce)

I don't find those reviews reassuring considering the sources.

I think we have to look back like this to understand why we are where we are now. It's time to reverse that "intellectual leveraged buyout" of our party.

Otherwise known as a "hostile takeover."

September 22, 2015

9/10/15 Sanders and Cummings Introduce Legislation to Lower Soaring Drug Prices ...

Al Franken co-sponsors.

Sanders, Cummings Introduce Comprehensive Legislation to Lower Soaring Drug Prices

WASHINGTON, Sept. 10 – Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Ranking Member Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) today introduced legislation to address skyrocketing increases in prescription drug prices.

Americans, who already pay the highest prices for prescription drugs in the world, saw prices jump more than 12 percent last year, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. That increase was more than double the rise in overall medical costs. Nearly one in five Americans did not fill a prescription last year because they could not afford it.

“Americans should not have to live in fear that they will go bankrupt if they get sick. People should not have to go without the medication they need just because their elected officials aren’t willing to challenge the drug and health care industry lobby,” Sanders said. The pharmaceutical industry spent nearly $230 million on lobbying last year, some $65 million more than any other industry, and employed over 1,400 registered lobbyists.

“In light of 1,000 percent price increases – and more – American families are fed up with trying to afford their medications as they watch drug companies rake in record profits,” Ranking Member Cummings said. “This commonsense and comprehensive bill will reverse this alarming trend, help put people before profits, and make lifesaving drugs more affordable and accessible to millions of Americans families.”

Co-sponsors and supporters:

The Senate bill is cosponsored by Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.). The legislation is supported by the Alliance for Retired Americans, Social Security Works, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, National Center for Health Research, Public Citizen, Association of Clinicians for the Underserved, and RxRights, representing the voices of millions of Americans.

September 22, 2015

It's Al From's Democratic Party..the rest of us just live here. The takeover.

Matt Stoller in 2014 reviewed the new book by Al From, founder of the Democratic Leadership Council.

It’s Al From’s Democratic Party, we just live here.

So who is Al From?

Most people who consider themselves good Democrats don’t know the name Al From, though political insiders certainly do. He was never a cabinet member. He worked in the White House, but in the 1970s, for as a junior staffer for Jimmy Carter’s flailing campaign to stop inflation. He’s never written a famous tell-all book. He hasn’t ever held an elected office, his most high-profile role was as a manager of the domestic policy transition for the White House in 1992, which took just a few months. He doesn’t even have a graduate degree. From fits into that awkward space in American politics, of doer, organizer, activist, convener, a P.T. Barnum of wonks and hacks. Such are the vagaries of American political power, that those who are famous are not always those are the actual architects of power. Because From, a nice, genial, and idealistic business-friendly man, is the structural engineer behind today’s Democratic Party.

To give you a sense of how sprawling From’s legacy actually is, consider the following. Bill Clinton chaired the From’s organization, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and used it as a platform to ascend to the Presidency in 1992. His wife Hillary is a DLC proponent. Al Gore and Joe Biden were DLCers. Barack Obama is quietly an adherent to the “New Democrat” philosophy crafted by From, so are most of the people in his cabinet, and the bulk of the Senate Democrats and House Democratic leaders. From 2007–2011, the New Democrats were the swing bloc in the U.S. House of Representatives, authoring legislation on bailouts and financial regulation of derivatives. And given how Democrats still revere Clinton, so are most Democratic voters, at this point. The DLC no longer exists, but has been folded into the Clinton’s mega-foundation, the Clinton Global Initiative, a convening point for the world’s global elite that wants to, or purports to want to, do good. In other words, it’s Al From’s Democratic Party, we just live here.

Some say that the Third Way is the new DLC.

Probably some truth in both.

An excerpt from Al From's book about how they got started.

Recruiting Bill Clinton

A little after four o’clock on the afternoon of April 6, 1989, I walked into the office of Governor Bill Clinton on the second floor of the Arkansas State Capitol in Little Rock.

“I’ve got a deal for you,” I told Clinton after a few minutes of political chitchat. “If you agree to become chairman of the DLC, we’ll pay for your travel around the country, we’ll work together on an agenda, and I think you’ll be president one day and we’ll both be important.” With that proposition, Clinton agreed to become chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, and our partnership was born. With Clinton as its leader, the New Democrat movement that sprung from the DLC over the next decade would change the course of the Democratic Party in the United States and of progressive center-left parties around the world.

....Though Clinton came from a conservative state and knew how to communicate with the moderate and conservative voters Democrats needed to win back, he was also well-regarded among liberals—and so would help the DLC broaden its appeal in all but the most extreme-left parts of the party. Appealing to a broader spectrum of the Democratic Party was important for the DLC, and for me personally. Though the political shorthand had always referred to the DLC as moderate or conservative Democrats, our ideas were really about modernizing liberalism and defining a new progressive center for our party, not simply pushing it further to the right. Coming from the center-left of the party, I was tired of having the DLC labeled as conservative. I decided to call our think tank the Progressive Policy Institute because I thought it would be harder for reporters to label it as the “conservative Progressive Policy Institute.”

From includes a memo he sent Clinton while urging him to take the chairmanship of the DLC.

Sam Nunn has taken his meeting with you in December and your statements to me in early January as a commitment that you would take the chairmanship, and is expecting to pass the gavel to you in New Orleans. But every signal I’ve gotten from you in the last month indicates you’re still up in the air. That ambivalence is a killer for us as we prepare for New Orleans.

I believe you are the right person for the DLC job—and the DLC job is the right job for you. We have the opportunity to redefine the Democratic Party during the next two years. If our efforts lead to a presidential candidacy—whether for you or someone else—we can take over the party, as well.

And history shows they DID take over the party.

At the national convention of a major political party, an ideologically rigid sectarian clique secures the ultimate triumph. It inserts two of its own as nominees for the Presidency and the Vice Presidency. Heavily financed by the most powerful corporations in the world, the group's leaders gather in a private club fifty-four floors above the convention hall, apart from the delegates of the party they had infiltrated. There, they carefully monitor the convention's acceptance of a platform the organization had drafted almost in its entirety. Then, with the ticket secured and with the policy course of the party set, they introduce a team of 100 shock troops to deploy across the country to lock up the party's grassroots.

This is not some fantastic political thriller starring Harrison Ford or Sharon Stone. This is the real-life version of Invasion of the Party Snatchers--with the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) burrowing into the pod that is the Democratic Party.

There was an article in the Washington Post in 2003. Can't even find the original in the Wayback Machine, but I saved most of the article.

The 'D' in DLC Doesn't Stand for Dean (David Von Drehle, May 15, 2003, Washington Post)

More than 50 centrist Democrats, including Virginia Gov. Mark R. Warner, met here yesterday to plot strategy for the "New Democrat" movement. To help get the ball rolling they read a memo by Al From and Bruce Reed, the chairman and president of the Democratic Leadership Council. The memo dismissed Dean as an elitist liberal from the "McGovern-Mondale wing" of the party -- "the wing that lost 49 states in two elections, and transformed Democrats from a strong national party into a much weaker regional one."

"It is a shame that the DLC is trying to divide the party along these lines," said Dean spokesman Joe Trippi. "Governor Dean's record as a centrist on health care and balancing the budget speaks for itself."

As founder of the DLC, From has been pushing the Democratic Party to the right for nearly 20 years. He was in tall cotton, philosophically speaking, when an early leader of the DLC, Bill Clinton, was elected president in 1992. As Clinton's domestic policy guru, Reed pushed New Democrat ideas -- such as welfare reform -- that were often unpopular with party liberals.

"We are increasingly confident that President Bush can be beaten next year, but Dean is not the man to do it," Reed and From wrote. "Most Democrats aren't elitists who think they know better than everyone else."

When the Democrats through the DLC became beholden to big money and power, there was really no place left for the rest of us. The money and power folks did not need to stand for the lesser of us in the party. They did not have to take positions which would benefit us.

The power grab was described by one DLC member as the "intellectual leveraged buyout" of the party.

The Wise Geek says that a leveraged buyout is also known as a hostile takeover.

A leveraged buyout is a tactic through which control of a corporation is acquired by buying up a majority of their stock using borrowed money. It may also be referred to as a hostile takeover, a highly-leveraged transaction, or a bootstrap transaction. Once control is acquired, the company is often made private, so that the new owners have more leeway to do what they want with it. This may involve splitting up the corporation and selling the pieces of it for a high profit, or liquidating its assets and dissolving the corporation itself.

September 20, 2015

Wasserman Schultz hypocritical about rules. 2008 said Dean's DNC rules "counterproductive"

Shortening a very very long involved story...during 2008 primary FL and MI voted to move their primaries ahead in violation of DNC rules. Howard Dean was chairman of the DNC and said rules should be obeyed.

Debbie was one of Hillary Clinton's campaign chairpersons. Both states launched attacks on Dean and the DNC because he stood by the party's rules.

I will never forget the words of Debbie Wasserman Schultz when an interviewer said Dean was following the rules.

She said no need to "stamp feet" about rules being broken.

This part really got to me.

She even told CNN that "we need to stop worrying about whether rules were broken and that all of this talk about the rules and that kind of thing is counterproductive".

She has definite rules now about debates. How would she feel if someone broke those rules under her chairmanship.

She felt strongly she was right, even when she and Ed Schultz confronted each other on Larry King live in 2008. It was a shocking confrontation.



I have no idea how this primary will end. It wasn't supposed to end last time with Obama as the winner.

I do know that manipulating the debate schedule means that the candidate with the most name recognition has the best chance. People pay attention to debates.

I do know that I feel anger building up that should not be happening. It is undemocratic to keep all party voices from being heard.

Debbie has her rules. She didn't care much for rules in 2008. Something is wrong with that picture.

Edit to add the Sept 14 Charles Pierce column at Esquire:

The blog generally stays away from the Dems In Disarray narratives because, too often in the past, these have been used to obscure the fact that the Republicans are running an incredible passel of public omadhauns for president. However, the blog also has been quite clear in its desire that Democratic national chairperson Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-CNN) be removed from her current position because the evidence that she's done much of anything in the post is not exactly overwhelming. This feeling, it appears, is becoming somewhat general.

.....Two national committee vice chairs, US Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii and former Minneapolis mayor R.T. Rybak, have broken with Wasserman Schultz, taking to Facebook to push for more debates and for eliminating the penalty for candidates who stray from the rules. Under the current arrangement, they said, "more people will feel excluded from our political process, rather than included." New Hampshire state Senator Martha Fuller Clark, vice chairwoman of her state party, also criticized Wasserman Schultz for threatening to punish candidates who take part in unsanctioned debates, and echoed Kozikowski's concern that the Democratic Party is putting itself at a strategic disadvantage. "I'm very disappointed that the chair of the DNC has been unwilling to reconsider this schedule, which she determined on her own, with her staff. She did not run it by the executive committee of the DNC, she did not run it by the members of the DNC. People have been telling her that they are unhappy with this schedule, and she has been adamant about not making any changes," Fuller Clark said. "The decision that was made by Debbie Wasserman Schultz makes it harder to showcase all the candidates," the Portsmouth Democrat said. Fuller Clark said that she has not decided which candidate she will support for president.

While the Republicans are not shy about sitting the crazy aunts and uncles right there in the front parlor, the Democrats seem reluctant to show the country Martin O'Malley and Bernie Sanders. This is called being too clever by half. It's also called administrative incompetence.

September 19, 2015

Iraq was a think tank war. Tried to scare us with bags of sugar held up on the talk shows.

From a website in Australia in 2003. I kept this article through the years. They really nailed us on this.

A think tank war: Why old Europe says no

It was in no way a conspiracy. As far back as 1998, ultra right US think tanks had developed and published plans for an era of US world domination, sidelining the UN and attacking Iraq. These people were not taken seriously. But now they are calling the tune.

German commentators and correspondents have been confused. Washington has tossed around so many types of reasons for war on Baghdad "that it could make the rest of the world dizzy", said the South German Times.

It's not about Saddam's weapons

So it goes. Across the world critics of President Bush are convinced that a second Gulf War is actually about replacing Saddam, whether the dictator is involved with WMD or not. "It's not about his WMD," writes the German born Israeli peace campaigner, Uri Avnery, "its purely a war about world domination, in business, politics, defence and culture".

There are real models for this. They were already under development by far right Think Tanks in the 1990s, organisations in which cold-war warriors from the inner circle of the secret services, from evangelical churches, from weapons corporations and oil companies forged shocking plans for a new world order.

In the plans of these hawks a doctrine of "might is right" would operate, and the mightiest of course would be the last superpower, America.

I don't have the link for this now, it was from 1998. I saved the quote. They'd been planning this for a long time.

.In a November 1997 Sunday morning appearance on ABC, Defense Secretary William Cohen held up a five-pound bag of sugar for the cameras to dramatize the threat of Iraqi anthrax: "This amount of anthrax could be spread over a city -- let's say the size of Washington. It would destroy at least half the population of that city. One breath and you are likely to face death within five days."

"It could wipe out populations of whole countries!" Cokie Roberts gasped as Cohen described the Iraqi arsenal. "Millions, millions," Cohen responded, "if it were properly dispersed."

Fear fear terror terror, the building blocks of a unjust war.

Some of the spokesmen for war talked so tough they almost sounded childish. Atlanta Journal Constitution editor in the early 2000's wrote that he thought the real purpose of the war was to mark US emergence as a "full-fledged" global empire. He quoted Donald Kagan, one of the architects of the Iraq invasion:

Bookman quoted Donald Kagan as saying we were "Gary Cooper."

"If our allies want a free ride, and they probably will, we can't stop that," he says. But he also argues that the United States, given its unique position, has no choice but to act anyway.

"You saw the movie 'High Noon'? he asks. "We're Gary Cooper."

Accepting the Cooper role would be an historic change in who we are as a nation, and in how we operate in the international arena.

I kept a quote by a fairly new DUer in 2008. It was a short but powerful post.

A new poster here this week named Junofeb said something in just a few words that impressed me so much. I quote him.

"Bill could have said, "well, Iraq is disarmed, perhaps there is a peaceful solution"

He could have said, "Iraq is disarmed, you're safe now from that threat"

He could have stopped the bombing and the starving of children thru sanctions on FOOD AND MEDICINE!

But he let his minions say "Look closely at this scary sugar bag. If we don't bomb these people, this will happen to you."

The invasion of Iraq was a turning point for me in how I viewed my country's leaders and their policies. I could not reconcile it to how I once pictured this nation. I still have not.

September 16, 2015

Found at Twitter. A rhyme about Bernie's venues.

Found at Twitter page Early Hunting.

September 15, 2015

Let's talk more about the Citgo Venezuela program for heating fuel. Not just Bernie's state.

This has helped too many people to be used in an attack against any candidate.

I found this link to a DU post in 2005. It tells a lot about the program.

Vermont could be in Venezeula's cheap-oil pipeline

Sunday, December 18, 2005

Vermont could be in Venezeula's cheap-oil pipeline

Published: Friday, December 16, 2005
By Terri Hallenbeck
Free Press Staff Writer

MONTPELIER -- Some of that cheap Venezeulan oil that has been flowing into the homes of poor people in Massachusetts and New York might make its way to Vermont, under a plan being negotiated by Rep. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

The deal is not sealed, but a plan in the works would have the Vermont Fuel Dealers Association buying fuel from Citgo, an oil company controlled by the Venezuelan government, said Sean Cota, a member of the association's board of directors and co-owner of Cota & Cota fuel dealership in Bellows Falls. Because the fuel is offered at lower prices than other oil companies are charging, the savings would be passed on to help those receiving home-heating assistance.

The move would give Vermont much-needed relief in providing help to people who are struggling to pay unusually high heating bills this season, but it would also put Republican Vermont Gov. Jim Douglas in the awkward position of accepting help from a leftist critic of President Bush.

Heat won out over politics, said Douglas' spokesman, Jason Gibbs.
(snip/...)

More about the program.

Venezuela Donates Free Heating Oil to 100k Needy US Households

Be sure to note who turned down the opportunity to help those in need of keeping warm. Article is from 2013.

In 2005, a pair of devastating hurricanes, Katrina and Rita, led to dwindling oil supplies and skyrocketing fuel costs. Some of the poorest and most vulnerable Americans, including many elderly people on fixed incomes, found themselves having to choose between heating their homes or providing food, clothing or medicine for themselves and their families. Since that first winter, CITGO has provided 227 million gallons of free heating oil worth an estimated $465 million to an average of 153,000 US households each year. Some 252 Native American communities and 245 homeless shelters have also benefited from the program. This winter, more than 100,000 American families will receive Venezuelan aid. With the US government estimating that households heating primarily with oil will pay $407 (19 percent) more this year than last, the program remains an invaluable helping hand to many needy Americans.

.....Last year, President Barack Obama and Congress reduced Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) funding by 25 percent, cutting off an estimated one million US households from desperately needed assistance just as winter's worst chill, accompanied by record heating oil prices, set in. Fortunately, the CITGO-Venezuela Heating Oil Program was able to assist an estimated 400,000 Americans last year.

.....Kennedy thanked CITGO, Venezuela and Chávez for "help[ing] more than 400,000 people stay warm and safe this winter," adding that he has approached numerous major oil-producing nations as well as some of the largest US oil companies and asked them if they were interested in helping the poor heat their homes.

"I don't see Exxon responding," he told the crowd in Baltimore. "I don't see other major oil companies heating the homes of the poor."

"They all said no," Kennedy added, "except for CITGO, President Chávez and the people of Venezuela."

There is a map at this link telling who the program serves.

Who we serve

Here is a program overview.

ON EDIT:

Video of David Brock confirming the Hugo Chavez part of the email. He does not back down, just calls it research. The word "lackey" is not mine but the word used by the one who put up the video. I would not have used the word myself.