http://www.thenation.com/article/can-the-democratic-party-be-united/

Tom Frank examines the “Hillary Doctrine,” her long-standing commitment to microfinance as the best way to help poor women around the world. It doesn’t work, he argues. Tom’s new book is Listen, Liberal!

This Could Be Make-or-Break Monday for Bernie Sanders
Gregory Glover
truth dig

The Sanders campaign is counting on high voter turnout to win big in the Golden State and five other states in the final Super Tuesday round of primaries June 7. So far, the news is encouraging for the Vermont senator: More than 850,000 new voters have registered for the 2016 California elections.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “the newly registered voters are overwhelmingly young people, with 37 percent under 25 and 64 percent 35 or younger.”

California gives Sanders a third reason for hope: The Chronicle reports that so long as they register by Monday, independent voters—another source of strength for his campaign—can ask for the Democratic ballot on election day.

Bernie Sanders just declared war on the Democratic establishment
Chris Cillizza
The Washington Post

If you want to make a politician really, really angry, endorse their primary opponent. That's exactly what Bernie Sanders did Saturday to Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

That puts Sanders on the side of Tim Canova, a former Capitol Hill staffer who has enjoyed considerable fundraising success -- he's raised more than $1 million -- thanks to an anti-establishment message in his primary against Wasserman Schultz.

And it ensures that the nastiness between Sanders and his supporters and Wasserman Schultz and the mainstream Democrats she represents will now surge into a full-blown battle.

Now that Sanders has endorsed Wasserman Schultz's opponent, everything is even more personal than it was 24 hours ago. And when things get personal, reason and pragmatism often fly out the window. That's bad news for Democrats hoping to quickly unite the party in advance of the general election fight against Donald Trump. It's war now.

Why Hillary Clinton's 90s nostalgia is so dangerous
Thomas Frank
The Guardian

American columnists have already expressed their annoyance with Hillary for offloading her duties-to-come onto her husband and thus compromising the first female presidency before it’s even started. But what really lends distinction to her announcement is the perversity, the sheer incoherence of the kind of policies she seems to hope her husband will recommend.

And deregulation! Before I watched the video of that Hillary Clinton campaign event, I had never heard someone denounce deregulation and hail the economic achievements of Bill Clinton in the same speech. That kind of mental combination, I’ve always assumed, puts you in danger of spontaneous combustion or something. After all, Bill Clinton is America’s all-time champion deregulator. He deregulated banks. He deregulated telecoms. He appointed arch deregulators Robert Rubin and Larry Summers to high office, and he re-upped Ronald Reagan’s pet Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan. He took some time out to dynamite the federal welfare system, then he came back and deregulated banks some more. And derivative securities, too.

Yes, we all know that times were good in the last few years of Bill Clinton’s presidency. But unless 90s nostalgia has completely paralyzed our brains, we also know that this was due in large part to a series of financial bubbles. It is true that a different person was in the White House when the last of those bubbles exploded, but even a child understands that doesn’t get Bill Clinton entirely off the hook for it. Nor would it be a good idea to get Bill working on another Nasdaq bubble, even assuming such a thing is possible.

It all puts me in mind of a little nostalgia of my own. One of the reasons I voted for Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton during the hopeful summer of 2008 was because I thought we needed to shut the door on the Clinton legacy once and for all. Obama won the nomination and, thanks to a global economic crisis, became president. But then he proceeded to bring back some of the very Clinton appointees that had done so much to precipitate the disaster in the first place.

Will Hillary Clinton’s Plan to Have Her Husband Fix the Economy Hurt Her at the Polls?
Emma Niles
TruthDig

Hillary Clinton is dishing out details on how her potential administration would function—and apparently, it includes a lot of help from her husband, former President Bill Clinton.

“Aides said Mr. Clinton’s role would be narrowly defined to focus on hard-hit areas of the country, such as the Rust Belt, and they rejected any implication that Mrs. Clinton would outsource a central part of her administration to her spouse,” writes The New York Times, although it adds that her declaration “raised questions about how such an arrangement would work in a White House that has long relied on an appointed Treasury secretary and National Economic Council.”

So although Hillary’s campaign is heavily depending on her husband’s legacy to woo the votes of working-class whites (a group she has not done well with), the intense scrutiny of Bill’s economic record may not help her campaign in the way she hopes.

In a piece published Friday by The Guardian, Thomas Frank summed up the danger of 1990s nostalgia. “Look at where we are now: soaring inequality, a recovery that never seems to come, a fraying middle class, a furious public, and improbable protest candidates drawing millions of votes,” he writes. “But all of it is as nothing, I suppose, when compared to the golden allure of the past.”

How to Save Clintonism
DAVID M. SHRIBMAN

Celebrated by its supporters as a synonym for peace, prosperity and a common-sense centrism, Clintonism was — and is still — derided by its detractors on the left as corporatism and on the right as a shorthand for scandal and impeachable offenses. As Mrs. Clinton tries to unite her fractious party and turn her focus to Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, she is also looking to what can be salvaged and what must be discarded from her husband’s legacy.

In its original form, Clintonism was an effort to pull the Democratic Party — which had lost five of the six presidential elections between 1968 and 1988 — back into political relevance. Forged out of Mr. Clinton’s years as governor of Arkansas, it involved more than just tweaking Democratic orthodoxy. Mr. Clinton wanted to help big corporations thrive, favored trade policies that unions loathed and spoke of reining in welfare and fighting crime.

But Clintonism 1.0, designed to carve out a middle ground, may prove obsolete in 2016, when the center might not hold. Senator Bernie Sanders is trying to push Mrs. Clinton left on the issues of income disparity, student loan debt and health care costs. And even as Mr. Trump assails the liberal goal of immigration reform, he has also voiced the frustration of white working-class voters who, like liberal Sanders partisans, are angry about stagnating wages and trade.

But for Mrs. Clinton the challenge is probably greater because, unlike the children of presidents, she was there by her husband’s side, his partner, during two turbulent terms. So while she can share in much of the credit for the achievements of Clintonism, she must also bear the weight of its mistakes.

Bill Clinton’s track record on economy is back in the spotlight
Jon Talton
The Seattle Times

If I were a political pundit, I’d say Hillary Clinton added to reasons why she might lose the election by promising an economic role for her husband, former President Bill Clinton, in her administration.

At the same time, Bill Clinton oversaw passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Trade among Mexico, Canada and the United States expanded massively.

However, contrary to its name, NAFTA was a managed-trade agreement and template for future deals. To critics, these agreements give too much power to influential corporate interests. For example, NAFTA prevented Mexico from nationalizing American factories and other interests there.

Clinton and his Treasury secretaries, Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, helped push for deregulation of the financial sector, from going easy on derivatives to the rise of the big banks and repeal of Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era banking act. Clinton reappointed Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve. A disciple of Ayn Rand, Greenspan supported financial laissez faire. His Fed regulated lightly and kept credit easy for Wall Street.

For those just getting back from the Mars expedition, those policies prepared the ground for the financial collapse and Great Recession.

Neoliberal economics, championed by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Reagan, had seemingly triumphed. We were at “the end of history.” Clinton embraced this world view, although advocating a “third way” between right and left.

Beyond the Hyperbole: What Really Happened at the Nevada State Convention
Donovan Farley
Paste

The problem was, there was no pattern of violence, much less any actual chair-throwing. This video shows a chair being lifted, before the individual comes to their senses and hugs—not bludgeons to death—the person in front of them. After spending countless hours researching and watching videos, there is not a single shred of proof of these claims, and NPR has even acknowledged that their use of the word “violence” in a recent post was misleading.

Adding ridiculous fuel to the already absurd fire was respected Senator—and avowed Clinton supporter—Barbara Boxer, who made sure to hurry to CNN and share her traumatizing experience at the convention. Boxer—who apparently forgot that cell phones are a thing and the Internet exists—claimed she “feared for her safety” in the “scary situation.” Belying this claim, there’s a video of Boxer walking off stage while smiling and snidely blowing kisses to the Sanders supporters (this after her “speech” in which she said “we” when referring to the Clinton campaign).

So why all the indignant articles feigning outrage at Sanders’ supposedly rabid and out-of-control supporters by the bought-and-paid-for mainstream press? Because that story makes it easier to advance the Clinton Political Machine’s latest narrative—that Sanders and his supporters should do what’s “best for the party” and bow out of the race. Because Kentucky’s incredibly close primary was two days later, and what better way to sway the minds of those on the fence than a tale of sour grapes spinning into wild, uncivilized violence? (Clinton would go on to win Kentucky by a mere .5%.) Because avoiding the issues at the heart of the Democratic split is easier when you keep the populace distracted with sensationalistic stories of violence.

Beyond being yet another troubling example of collusion between the mainstream media and the Clinton campaign, this serves to further illustrate how dangerous the DNC finds Bernie Sanders—and how they are willing to mortgage the future to discredit him, and all his supporters, today.

Reid: Nevada convention was 'fair' to Sanders
Jessie Hellmann
Politico

"I can't speak for the DNC — I can speak for Nevada. We went out of our way to be fair to Bernie, even though the caucuses were won by Clinton in February," Reid told MSNBC's "AM Joy" in an interview aired Saturday.

"I made sure that the convention was not favoring Hillary Clinton. ... Even though she won the state in February, I wanted to make sure that no one could criticize what went on there."

Sanders and his supporters blasted the Democratic Party last week for what they say was a tipping of the scales in Clinton's favor at the convention.

Pushed by party leaders to condemn the outbursts and threats from his supporters at Saturday's convention, Sanders instead issued a statement accusing the Nevada Democratic Party of using its power to prevent a "fair and transparent process from taking place."

Donald Trump pledges to eliminate gun-free zones
The Irish Times

Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump assured gun owners on Friday he would protect their constitutional right to bear arms and eliminate gun-free zones if elected, accusing Democrat Hillary Clinton of wanting to weaken gun rights.

Mr Trump’s remarks at the NRA’s national convention in Louisville, Kentucky, were not a surprise, but they could solidify his status among conservatives who see protecting the US Constitution’s Second Amendment as a top priority.