Politics

n her essay “Sexism in American Politics,” Barbra Streisand has written (or had ghostwritten) the sweeping and quite false claim that Hillary Clinton is “held to a pernicious double standard” only because she’s a woman, a claim that Streisand fails to support with any relevant, substantive evidence.  

Like it or not, Bernie and The Donald are connected for the rest of this race and, in the bigger picture, for history. Talking heads link them by accusing Bernie's supporters of being cut from The Donald's supporters' same cloth. Shortsighted companymen in the media are undoubtedly satisfied at having noticed and developed a theory all on their own: people are angry.

While some writers write that this means Establishment Candidates will end up doing "such and such," others contend it proves that Anti-Establishment Candidates will wind up doing "this and that." Basically, expert pundits are experiencing difficulties and nobody knows whats to come.

“Are you tired of the 1 percent making more than the bottom half of this country?” asked Troy Harris, an activist with Central Ohio Grassroots for Bernie Sanders. “Are you tired of corporate-owned Democrats and Republicans who are controlling our legislative interests? Are you tired of Starbucks and Wal-Mart decimating our communities?

“I’ve got a candidate for you,” he said. “His name is Bernie Sanders.”

Harris was speaking to a crowd of about 900 Sanders supporters at the Wexner Center Plaza on the Ohio State University campus on February 27, a few days after a Sanders campaign office opened on East Main Street in Columbus.

Many of the speakers at the rally emphasized the local implications of Bernie Sanders’ national platform. CWA Local 4501 president Kevin Kee brought the focus directly to OSU and the university’s privatization of much of its workforce.

“They outsourced the parking here, and now pay employees $8 an hour,” Kee said. “You can’t raise a family on $8 an hour. You can’t buy a car on $8 an hour. Are we in a race to the absolute bottom of the wage scale, or do we believe that there should be a living wage?

BANGKOK, Thailand -- While the U.S. alliance with Thailand suffers
strains after Bangkok's 2014 coup, Russia has delivered combat
helicopters to the military regime and now wants to provide tanks,
counter-terrorism training, security intelligence and other
assistance, Russia's ambassador to Thailand said in an interview.
   Moscow's willingness to support coup leader Prime Minister Prayuth
Chan-ocha sharply contrasts with the Obama administration's public
criticism of Thailand's junta, Russian Ambassador Kirill Barsky said.
   Meanwhile, Thailand's Defense Minister Gen. Prawit Wongsuwon, who
is also deputy prime minister, visited Russia February 23-27 so the
two sides could tighten military relations after decades of relatively
low-key links, Mr. Barsky said.
   Prime Minister Prayuth is invited to join a May summit in the
Russian city of Sochi between the Kremlin and the Association of
Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) which also includes Brunei, Cambodia,
Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore and
Vietnam.

Bernie Sanders can absolutely win the Democratic Party’s nomination. He’s still way behind Hillary Clinton in a number of Super Tuesday states. But you have to have worked on or followed presidential campaign politics to understand the power of momentum. If you ask any campaign leader which they’d rather have, the lead or momentum, they will usually choose momentum.

Leads can dissolve quickly in the face of momentum. Nationally, Hillary Clinton used to lead Sanders by an average of about 20 percentage points. But in the wake of Sanders’s surprising performance in Iowa and his 22-point margin of victory in New Hampshire, the latest Quinnipiac poll shows he and Hillary are statistically tied across the country.

How did this happen? Did people suddenly remember they didn’t like Hillary Clinton? No. Many are suddenly finding out that they actually like Bernie Sanders — a lot.

Bernie Sanders' common sense proposals for dealing with universal health care, college tuition, restoring the infrastructure, confronting poverty and more have encountered predictable scorn from "fiscally responsible" corporatists.

They all scream about the "deficit spending" and tax hikes that might be required to pay for these vital programs. From predictable right-wing corporatists to Hillary Clinton ("free stuff! free stuff!" she mocks) to fictional "left-leaning economists" invented by the New York Times, numerous voices scorn Bernie’s agenda because his proposals "cost too much."

In South Carolina, African-Americans will constitute a majority of Democratic voters in the primary on Feb. 27. On March 1, Super Tuesday, people of color — blacks, Latinos, Asian-Americans — will constitute large portions of the voters. The press is focused on whom we want. But we would be far better off to be focused on what we want.

Democratic candidates — not just Sanders and Clinton, but contenders in Senate and gubernatorial races as well — have to listen and respond. They can no longer simply expect to inherit our votes or to ignore our concerns. Their prospects in both the primaries and the general election depend, in significant part, on giving us a reason to vote and to vote in large numbers.

We’ve already seen the impact of this new reality. Black Lives Matter demonstrations across the country have raised the demand for criminal justice reform — and Sanders and Clinton have responded. The Dreamers and the Latino uprising raised the commitment to comprehensive immigration reform.

For at least the last four decades now I feel like I’ve been living in Beached America: a nation that has lost its values, even as it writhes in violent agitation, inflicting its military on the vulnerable regions of the planet.

It does so in the name of those lost values . . . democracy, freedom, equality. These are just dead words at this point, public relations blather, silently followed by a sigh: yada, yada, yada. Then we send in the drones.

This is the behavior of a nation that is spiritually beached. Ideas that could open up the future have long been gagged, mocked and marginalized, locked in a closet somewhere. No way can they be allowed to have political influence. Thanks, mainstream media.

No, the cornfields are not full of dumb blondes (except when Fox News shows up), but it truly is hard not to be sexist in Iowa.

For example, I think it's reprehensible to take tens of millions of dollars from murderous kingdoms and dictatorships and then waive restrictions on selling them weapons including the weapons that Saudi Arabia has been using to slaughter men, women, and children in Yemen. And this makes me a sexist, or so I'm told.

In my view, parroting every war lie of Bush and Cheney was disgusting enough, but then pretending you meant well and didn't understand, even though once the war was begun you voted over and over again to fund it, is literally criminal as well as a moral abomination. Taking so many millions of dollars from war profiteers just makes it worse -- at least in the eyes of us sexist fans of Jill Stein.