The Sanders Money Mafia Machine, part 1

It's no wonder Bernie Sanders won't talk to Vermont media, especially independent media or NPR/PBS.

To extensively update a previous post, not only did VTDigger break the details that Jane Sanders, Bernie's wife, was part of an FBI investigation into financial matters at now-defunct Burlington College, it's now added newer, and juicier fuel to that fire.

Update, June 23: Bernie and Jane have reportedly "lawyered up."

We'll keep an eye on that. Meanwhile, note that that's not the only problem they face.

Jane Sanders, via Burlington College

VT Digger now has a whole nother story about Jane Sanders and her time at Burlington.

Here’s a sample of the mixtape:

While one deal struck by Jane O’Meara Sanders during her time as Burlington College’s president has triggered a federal investigation, another arrangement she engineered is breeding claims of nepotism and allegations of veiled threats against her husband’s presidential campaign. 

The bad blood centers on the relationship the college forged with the Vermont Woodworking School, co-founded and run by Sanders’ daughter, Carina Driscoll. 

Carol Moore, the final president at Burlington College, broadly blames the school’s 2016 closing on Sanders. In a scathing op-ed last year, Moore wrote: “BC’s fate was set when its former board members hired an inexperienced president.” ... 

Moore is equally critical of a deal Jane Sanders brokered between the college and Driscoll’s Vermont Woodworking School, a facility in Franklin County where Burlington College students took courses. 

In interviews with VTDigger, Moore said the college got the short end of the stick.
“This was a sweetheart deal for Carina Driscoll, Jane Sanders’ daughter,” said Moore. Driscoll is the stepdaughter of Bernie Sanders. ... 

Moore alleges the woodworking school was “gouging the college.” She praised the academic merits of the program but said it was “barely” profitable. 

Students began attending the woodworking school in 2009 on what appears to have been a handshake deal. A formalized contract was made only under Jane Sanders’ successor as president, Christine Plunkett.

That's plenty enough for teaser, and all I can post under good fair use standards.

I lied. One more extract:

The Burlington College-Vermont Woodworking School connection is not the first time Sanders and her daughter have been accused of nepotism. 

Sanders & Driscoll LLC — a mother-daughter limited liability corporation — offered political consulting for Bernie Sanders’ 2002 and 2004 House races, and Jane Sanders drew more than $90,000 from the campaigns. The practice was allowed but frowned upon because of the opportunity to benefit from campaign donations.

It’s true that Bernie was one of 32 Members of Congress to do this in 2012.

Still, that’s little more than 5 percent of the membership, and is another black eye for Sanders’ fiscal honesty reputation.

Based on this story, I think I have a lot more confirmation about my theory of a full year ago and more than Jane was the one pushing Bernie's campaign. That said, Driscoll claims that Moore had it out for her and used the publicity about Bernie's prez run to try to browbeat her. She also claims she admitted the deal was unfair. But, apparently, never actually offered to redo it, which leads back to her mom.

I had speculated on these pages more than once last year if Jane, when president of the college, was trading on Bernie's name when trying to raise a big loan for glorious dreams of the college's future. And, given it closed suddenly last May, Bernie's lucky he wasn't nominated; media might have started nosing around this issue more at that time. Vermont local media probably were nosing around more.

I now have more confirmation for that idea, that Jane was trading on Bernie's name when she launched her big Burlington expansion scheme for "huge tracts of land." Maybe not a full shakedown, as she may already have been thinking about Bernie for Prez at that time, but hints, nods and expectations? Oh, hellz yes.

No real surprise to me. Sorry, Berners, Berners thinking about becoming Greens, etc. (And there aren't a lot of the latter; I see Berniecrat Twitterers touting Tulsi Gabbard for 2020; you're really, really wedded to the duopoly.)

It is also interesting that the investigation in the first link, per Burlington's board president, appears to have started before the college's official announcement of closure. Bradley Toensing's records request must have been treated fairly seriously from near the start — which could bring in a Barack Obama angle and/or a Hillary Clinton one, as well as the GOP one driven by Toensing — getcha popcorn, round two! (Arguing over this is why sharp-brained, but gnat-straining prolific Twitterer Actual Flatticus blocked me.)

Also per these pages in the past, I've suspected Jane was a fair part of the impetus behind Bernie's run, and in addition to his own political animalism, may have been part of the impetus behind his political shifts from the 1980s to today.

Politics is blood sport, per James Stewart. Bernie's deal-cutting with the Vermont Democratic Party in the past shows he knows this well.

That said, do I think she did anything illegal? Very likely not. I'm not totally sure one way or the other now, to update from the original.

Something unethical, whether by official college ethics standards or everyday ones? Pretty likely.

Something fiscally dumb, and that she knew it at the time? More than just "dumb."

Jane's reward? Running the Sanders Institute, with its hacktacular fellows such as Robert Reich, Ben Jealous and Cornel West. (Greens, stop fetishizing the man.) And, there's also Islamophobic fascist fellow traveler Gabbard.

Any of them getting paid with the dark or soft money they're already starting to rake in? As a 501(c)3, not a (c)4, they're likely going to peddle in soft, not dark money, per Open Secrets' explainer. But, ALL of the 501(c) classes do not have to disclose any donors. So, in that sense of the word, it's darkness all the way down.

(And, Our Revolution IS a c4. And, in 2018, with Bernie officially raking a million in 2017 for the second straight year, he could funnel money there.)

Now, Jane and Bernie may make a voluntary decision otherwise.

Don't hold your breath.

Do hold your breath, or rather, stand by, though, for something else.

Per the header, I'm sure there will be at least a Part 2 on this.

Hypocrisy alert: Bernie Sanders, wanting to suck on the military teat

Sen. Bernie Sanders

No wonder Bernie Sanders wants to run as a Democrat, not a Green; he's too willing to suck at the military teat (near end of story): 

Whatever its technical challenges, the F-35 is a triumph of political engineering, and on a global scale. For a piquant illustration of the difference that political engineering can make, consider the case of Bernie Sanders—former Socialist mayor of Burlington, current Independent senator from Vermont, possible candidate from the left in the next presidential race. In principle, he thinks the F-35 is a bad choice. After one of the planes caught fire last summer on a runway in Florida, Sanders told a reporter that the program had been “incredibly wasteful.” Yet Sanders, with the rest of Vermont’s mainly left-leaning political establishment, has fought hard to get an F-35 unit assigned to the Vermont Air National Guard in Burlington, and to dissuade neighborhood groups there who think the planes will be too noisy and dangerous. “For better or worse, [the F-35] is the plane of record right now,” Sanders told a local reporter after the runway fire last year, “and it is not gonna be discarded. That’s the reality.” It’s going to be somewhere, so why not here? As Vermont goes, so goes the nation.

So, Bernie, really? Ohh, it's bad, but I"m not going to oppose out-of-control military spending that makes Ike's "military-industrial complex" that much, because I want Vermont on the gravy train, even if it's a war weapon, even if it's a bloated one.

What else, Bernie? Want to invite the federal prison system to Vermont. You are a border state, and people could be sneaking through from Canada. Why not ask Immigration and Customs to build one, since they're already being nutbar on one town straddling the border with Quebec?

Better yet, why not contact Geo or one of the other private prison folks about this?

It would be one thing, Bernie, if you fought for tighter standards for organic dairy products to benefit Vermont's dairy industry, or a rule that automatically let all maple syrup be organic unless farmers are spraying known nonoriganic products on trees.

And, beyond that, Vermonters didn't WANT the F-35. They became more and more adamant about that. Result? Bernie pushed harder and harder to land it.

And, it's not just warhawking. It's warhawking for a plane that sucks. No other word for it:

Update, Feb. 23, 2021: By looking for a new low-cost fighter, as Forbes reports, the Air Force has tacitly admitted the F-35 is a fail.

 

But this is ridiculous.

(And, maybe it's connected to Israel wanting to upgrade F-16s to F-35s.)

Bernie, re the military-industrial complex, here's what you should be trying to do instead.

The M16 and its descendant rifles still suck almost as bad as they did in Nam, especially when compared to the good old AK-47, per this sidebar Atlantic piece.

Why don't you find out what,if any, international patents the Kalashnikov family has, get Congress to buy them up, and have us use the damned AK-47 for a quarter of the cost and double the reliability of the M4?

Speaking of guns, Bernie is also some kind of gun nut.

And, then, fight to kill all funding, period, for the F-35.

I've always thought that Sanders was kind of the Wizard of Oz behind some imagery, and now I'm thinking that more and more.

And, on military-related issues, I'm right. Counterpunch was raking him over the coals four years ago.

Let’s start with this:

Senator Sanders rarely misses a photo opportunity with Vermont National Guard troops when they are being deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq.  He’s always at the Burlington International Airport when they return.  If Sanders truly supported the Vermont troops, he would vote to end all of the wars posthaste.

Then note that the F-35 lust isn’t new, either:

Senator Patrick Leahy, Senator Bernie Sanders, and Congressman Peter Welch could hardly contain their enthusiasm over the news that Burlington International Airport had been named as a possible site to house the Air Force’s new F-35 fighter jet scheduled to replace the Vermont Air National Guard’s aging fleet of F-16s.

The author is a Vermonter. It appears that back home, Bernie’s not been fooling all the people for quite some time.

Another Counterpunch piece notes that Sanders is a bit of a squish on fighting hardcore Zionism.

And, a libertarian online mag, gathering a variety of links and sources, argues that Sanders might almost be a warhawk lite.

And, per this link, maybe Bernie's running as a Dem, if anything, because at the Vermont state level, he's long been into deal-making with the Democratic apparatus, and his rightward moves on foreign policy issues are part of this. The skinny on that piece is that Bernie has sold out to the bipartisan foreign policy establishment in exchange for the state Democratic party quashing any official opposition to him.

And, he was a war lover ever since the original Gulf War. Read that piece. Substitute the n-word into Bernie's take, and he sounds like George Wallace or other White South politicos saying in the 1960s that nobody was going to out-n them. Plus, part of why he probably doesn't like to talk about foreign policy issues a lot is that he's illiberal in general on them.

In other words, Bernie already is a Democrat, and has been for 20 years. Thank doorknob he's not running Green; the myth might quash a more legitimate candidate, like Dr. Jill Stein, the 2012 nominee, who's thrown her hat in the ring again.

The first link is a great read in general. James Fallows goes in depth about the separation of the military from the general public, the shallowness of "thank you for your service," the greater shallowness of continuing to feed the beast of the military-industrial complex and more.

And, I'm by no means alone. Here's another blogger calling out Sanders as a warhawk. So does friend Brains, who also tags him as a panderer on gun issues, which he is.

Jane Sanders under investigation (with grand jury news)

Jane Sanders, via Burlington College

The wife of former Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, Jane Sanders, IS part of an FBI investigation into financial matters at non-defunct Burlington College, detailed at VTDigger.

New update, Jan. 7, 2018: A grand jury has been empaneled in the case. That means the shit of indictments could be hitting the fan in just a few months. 

Reading through the story, and with the idea that GJs are often empaneled on a quarterly basis, I'm guessing this one started in October, and was renewed at the start of this year. So, end of March or start of April, we may hear something public. I highly doubt it would go longer than that. 

Also interesting is that the person interviewed for the story was before the GJ in October. Lips are being kept sealed on this, it would appear.

Update, May 15, 2018: No indictments yet. No dismissal of charges yet, either. A day after that previous update, the feds talked to Tony Pomerleau, described by Seven Days in Vermont as a Burlington real estate mogul. The piece offers a few other tidbits on updates, namely that two former college board members talked to the feds. Pomerleau was Jane Sanders' advisor on the land swap at the heart of the issue.

And, weirdly, old Bernie spox Jeff Weaver came out to deny even the existence of a grand jury. That's despite former college board trustee Robin Lloyd explicitly stating she talked to one. And it's connected with Bernie refusing to talk to Seven Days in a sit-down interview unless Jane and Burlington College are off the menu.

Meanwhile, a Sanders dynasty of sorts is in the works? His son is running for Congress (and trying to stand halfway between his dad and Trump on some issus) and his stepdaughter lost a race for Burlington mayor. (She was running against the incumbent.) Plus, his stepson was made creative director of the Sanders Institute. (Jane, per that piece, apparently tries to dodge Vermont-local media as much as Bernie.)

Update, June 23, 2017: Bernie and Jane have lawyered up, over questions about allegedly improper loans. Part of the allegations? Bernie's Senate staff pushed for shaky loans to be made to Jane for her Burlington expansion dream.

That said, per the story, if one-quarter is true, it mirrors Bernie's own transition from some sort of actual semi-Socialist to "he's really a Dem" in all but name Democratic Party hack.

Also look at the bottom of the piece. Harry Jaffe first covered Bernie in the 1970s. This isn't a fly-by-night journalist, or piece. Jaffe even wrote an unauthorized bio of Bernie.

Per Jaffe's bio, he's also not an ax-grinding wingnut. He was Pat Leahy's press secretary for a couple of years, after all. One might partially hold working with Michelle Rhee against him. That makes him more neoliberal than Bernie. Not the devil.

And, if you want to decide for yourself on bias or not, here's the Google book preview version of the book. If anything else, it seems to have a mix of animus for Bernie's bluntness with at least as much hagiography. That said, he's spot on with the Bernie "brand."

Also contradicting Actual Flatticus in other ways? The FDIC as well as the FBI are investigating, per VT Digger. It in turn notes that Seven Days in Vermont had written about some of the investigation.

No real surprise to me. Sorry, Berners, Berners thinking about becoming Greens, etc.

I had speculated on these pages more than once last year if Jane, when president of the college, was trading on Bernie's name when trying to raise a big loan for glorious dreams of the college's future. And, given it closed suddenly last May, Bernie's lucky he wasn't nominated; media might have started nosing around this issue more at that time.

It is interesting that the investigation, per Burlington's board president, appears to have started before the college's official announcement of closure. Bradley Toensing's records request must have been treated fairly seriously from near the start — which could bring in a Barack Obama angle and/or a Hillary Clinton one, as well as the GOP one driven by Toensing — getcha popcorn, round two!

To both Berniecrats and Never Trumpers of any stripe who see the name "Bradley Toensing" and say, well, Trump must be behind this? The Obama era DA for Vermont opened the investigation. The U.S. District Attorney's office for the District of Vermont didn't have to investigate anything. Just because, per Alan Simpson and Anita Hill, someone throws something over  transom doesn't make the DA forced to investigate it. Only if the DA's office deems it's a legit complaint or issue does that happen.

And, Actual Flatticus knows how DAs operate, too.

Beyond that, VT Digger notes the FBI subpoenaed related records in 2016. Remind me again, Flatticus and others, who was president then? There's also a timeline issue involved. VT Digger notes it first reported the donations issue in January 2016, and only then did Toensing make his investigation request. Click that link for other timeline issues, including how much investigatory work was being done before Jan. 20, 2017. Or, per this story, note that Burlington board of trustees members apparently knew an investigation was ongoing as of May 2016.

Is it true that Trumpers are distorting the issues? Like alleged actor James Woods claiming flat-out that Bernie himself committed bank fraud?

But of course.

And Trumpers also distorted Hillary Clinton email issues. So?

Update, July 6: Toensing says he was told a tip by a New Hampshire state senator, who in turn says he never would have told the feds. And why not? State Sen. Don Turner, a Republican, called it "hearsay" not worth passing on in that way. That said, this talk was after Toensing filed his first complaint in January 2016; it was behind his May 2016 complaint.

Now if, per that timeline, one wants to claim that someone in the FBI, or the Vermont US District Attorney's office, was a Hillbot doing HER bidding, bring it on. But, per what I said, no, there's no Trump Train conspiracy here.

Update, Nov. 29: VT Digger notes, in a late summer move-the-ball piece, that while both Jane and Bernie claim this is a Toensing hack job, the paper itself has been investigating the college's finances since 2011! Sorry, legend of Flatty, and sorry, any others who may excoriate Bernie as a sheepdog but don't look behind the curtain enough. And, sorry Jane, but, calling Toensing's claim in that latest piece "sexist" comes off like playing the Hillary Clinton card. VT Digger had another update at the same time in August, about Jane's influence peddling ties with a Burlington real estate magnate. Payback included giving said magnate Tony Pomerleau and his wife honorary degrees from the college. Meanwhile, a reader of the other alt-weekly type of paper in Vermont, Seven Days, says he thinks Jane is deserving of the focus and also resented Bernie's spokesperson Jeff Weaver politicizing it. (Scroll down to last letter on webpage.)

Also per these pages in the past, I've suspected Jane was a fair part of the impetus behind Bernie's run, and in addition to his own political animalism, may have been part of the impetus behind his political shifts from the 1980s to today.

Politics is blood sport, per James Stewart. Bernie's deal-cutting with the Vermont Democratic Party in the past shows he knows this well.

That said, do I think she did anything illegal? Very likely not.

Something unethical, whether by official college ethics standards or everyday ones? Possibly.

Something fiscally dumb, and that she knew it at the time? Yes.

==

Update, June 14: Maybe not "fiscally dumb" after all.

Independent news site VT Digger has a whole nother story about Jane Sanders and her time at Burlington.

Here’s a sample of the mixtape:

While one deal struck by Jane O’Meara Sanders during her time as Burlington College’s president has triggered a federal investigation, another arrangement she engineered is breeding claims of nepotism and allegations of veiled threats against her husband’s presidential campaign. 

The bad blood centers on the relationship the college forged with the Vermont Woodworking School, co-founded and run by Sanders’ daughter, Carina Driscoll. 

Carol Moore, the final president at Burlington College, broadly blames the school’s 2016 closing on Sanders. In a scathing op-ed last year, Moore wrote: “BC’s fate was set when its former board members hired an inexperienced president.” ... 

Moore is equally critical of a deal Jane Sanders brokered between the college and Driscoll’s Vermont Woodworking School, a facility in Franklin County where Burlington College students took courses. 

In interviews with VTDigger, Moore said the college got the short end of the stick.
“This was a sweetheart deal for Carina Driscoll, Jane Sanders’ daughter,” said Moore. Driscoll is the stepdaughter of Bernie Sanders. ... 

Moore alleges the woodworking school was “gouging the college.” She praised the academic merits of the program but said it was “barely” profitable. 

Students began attending the woodworking school in 2009 on what appears to have been a handshake deal. A formalized contract was made only under Jane Sanders’ successor as president, Christine Plunkett.

That's plenty enough for teaser, and all I can post under good fair use standards.

I lied. One more extract:

The Burlington College-Vermont Woodworking School connection is not the first time Sanders and her daughter have been accused of nepotism. 

Sanders & Driscoll LLC — a mother-daughter limited liability corporation — offered political consulting for Bernie Sanders’ 2002 and 2004 House races, and Jane Sanders drew more than $90,000 from the campaigns. The practice was allowed but frowned upon because of the opportunity to benefit from campaign donations.

It’s true that Bernie was one of 32 Members of Congress to do this in 2012.

Still, that’s little more than 5 percent of the membership, and is another black eye for Sanders’ fiscal honesty reputation.

Based on this story, I think I have a lot more confirmation about my theory of a full year ago and more than Jane was the one pushing Bernie's campaign. That said, Driscoll claims that Moore had it out for her and used the publicity about Bernie's prez run to try to browbeat her. She also claims she admitted the deal was unfair. But, apparently, never actually offered to redo it, which leads back to her mom.

Jane's reward? Running the Sanders Institute, with its hacktacular fellows such as Robert Reich, Ben Jealous and Cornel West. (Greens, stop fetishizing the man.) And, there's also Islamophobic fascist fellow traveler Tulsi Gabbard.

With all that in mind, it's no wonder Bernie won't talk to Vermont media. And, it's not just in Vermont; he and his staffers won't talk to Vermont media from their Capitol Hill perches in DC, either.

==

Sidebars — First Too many Greenies are too polite, or something, if they think discussion of this is a "smear" of Jane Sanders. It's not. Per Jaffe, bank fraud is hard to prove, but, it does happen. And, per Jaffe, even if the fraud can't be proven, the influence trading is a mile wide.

Otherwise, on the "Minnesota Nice" or whatever? Dear Leader wasn't the only person wrong to sing Kumbaya.

And, the half-siblings of AccommoGreens, those folks known as GreenieCrats, still don't want to believe their beloved Bernie is in trouble, let alone that Jane was trading on his name.

As for Greens who think it's irrelevant to the Green Party? Erm, wrong! Some Berniecrats, ignoring that the Green Party, and the Socialist Party USA, and others, exist, want him — or at least key loyalists — to start a third party.

Second — Quasi-Berniecrats (I'm thinking of one Twitter presence in particular) don't want to face the light. No, Bernie may not have committed bank fraud in the legal sense because, yes, it's damned hard to prove. At the same time, he may well have pressured a bank, with Jane already trading on his name in a small state. That's the ethical equivalent of bank fraud.

This is the same Bernie who lusts for F-35s, who threatened to have pro-Palestinian visitors to his office arrested as part of his blank check for Israel and more.

And, that one Twitter nitpicker? The Actual Flatticus who I've touted before? Claims this is a nothingburger. Claims that the fact Jane Sanders has him blocked on Twitter is proof that it's a nothingburger to him.

Seems to want to have the last works a lot for calling it a "nothingburger." He's also gotten the "framing" wrong vis-a-vis Tensing and the Obama-adminstration DA for Vermont, NOT Trump's, opening the investigation. And, he protests when other people in a threat post links to the likes of VT Digger. I posted one myself from there about Bernie yelling at staffers as proof that Jaffe's not the only person to say this.

He's been wrong a couple other times, on other issues. It's not a double Whopper to me; it's a regular-sized hamburger, though. Actually, no, it IS a double Whopper, in reflecting back on something from a couple of weeks ago. In claiming Amy Goodman once made $1 million a year, he cited from a website that touts chemtrails, 9/11 trutherism and other conspiracy theories, along with claiming the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are real. Also, the person who wrote the particular article he linked had sued WBAI and thus had a definite bias. Either Smithee didn't know that (I didn't have a chance to tell him before he blocked me) and so, again, his information isn't always correct, or he did know it and posted anyway.

Oh, and he was wrong as hell about Presidents allegedly not being subject to the Emoluments Clause.

Anyway, I don't need this to turn into a blog post about him.

What is at least a single Whopper, having now received it myself, is the amount of vitriol in which he engages, not so much with bigwig media professionals as with everyday John and Jane Does. And, I'll offer a bit of apology for a couple of cases in which I needlessly piled on.

Bernie 2020: The best Democrat there is overall ... BUT

Well, it's official: Bernie Sanders is running for president again.

He arguably has the best overall socioeconomic policies to boost the working poor and poor of all races and ethnic groups. He has the broadest package of proposals for this. Free college is great — but we shouldn't fetishize college and, if this did happen, we must guard against a credential creep becoming a gallop.

By agreeing to discuss allegations of sexual harassment, he has broadened the social focus of his campaign, and that could help him on the trail. Otherwise, on this issue? Gillibrand has led MeToo, in a very self-serving way. Klobuchar is a back-bencher. Warren has other, related issues, as does Harris.

So, let's pivot to racial issues, as Dem apparatchiks will attack Bernie on this even more than in 2016, surely. And?

Kamala is a cop. Booker is a kinder, meeker Obama. No idea of Gabbard on racial justice issues. Warren has her DNA issue. No other white Dems who have announced so far are unequivocally better than Sanders.

And, his age? A concern, but, as there's no Dem within 90 percent of him, not a deal, should I vote Dem in the primary next year.

OK, here's the buts, part 1.

Sanders, as of the time of his announcement, basically hadn't said a word about the Venezuela coup in motion on either of his Twitter accounts. Nor had he he said a word about AIPAC squishing Rep. Ilhan Omar. He opposes BDS. His one, staff-run Twitter account fully buys into Putin collusion. (Bernie has, occasionally, referenced our actions in Russia.) He seems part of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment on Afghanistan.

Of course, few Dems are better. Gabbard has said something on Venezuela; no other announced candidates have. All candidates are silent on or actively opposing BDS, including her. And, she's got her own problem in foreign policy — RSS.

So, Bernie's the best Dem overall? Yes. But. (Sidebar but: Per Smokey, he's not the same Bernie as in 2016.)

No Dem is good, overall, on foreign policy. Sadly, Counterpunch gave half a pass or more to Gabbard, briefly mentioning her meeting with Modi, not mentioning RSS, nor mentioning that she is a neocon on Israel. That said, Sanders is just as bad as the rest. (Andrew Stewart wrote THAT at Counterpunch, too. In turn, that shows the unevenness, or relative lack, of editorial oversight at Counterpunch.)

So, while he's the best Dem? Democrats, take note that this Green-leaner will praise him where he's good and critique where he's not.

Peter Beinart claims that Sanders 2020 is better than 2016. As proof, he links to an announcement on Sanders' Senate website, now a month old, that has one sentence opposing a coup in Venezuela. Beinart doesn't mention that both Sanders' Twitter accounts have radio silence on the Venezuela coup-of-sorts in progress.

Speaking of coups? Beinart won't tell you that Sanders still refuses to call the Obama-Clinton backed 2009 Honduras coup a coup. Nor that Bernie, while calling Gaza an open-air prison, still opposes BDS as a tool to get Israel to change its actions in and on Palestine. Not that Bernie, called out by Mondoweiss, goes beyond the bipartisan foreign policy establishment on support for Palestine in general. Nor have I heard any post-facto (and certainly not pre-facto) condemnation by Sanders of the war against Gadhafi's Libya that wrecked Africa's most prosperous economy.

I don't want to damn too much; this IS more than Bernie 2016. But, others, in addition to me, have noted that Bernie or his staff, at least on his staff-run @Bernie Twitter, have swallowed Donut Twitter's words on Russia"gate" and still seems pretty conventional on Syria.

Jacobin (of course) with its not-real-socialism "socialism," ignores this and crowns Bernie as our foreign policy savior.

It would be wonderful if Bernie would endorse those five points. But, he won't.

1. No Dem is taking climate change THAT seriously.
2. No Dem is ending arms sales to all alleged allies. (Israel)
3. No Dem is shutting all US military bases abroad; certainly not in Japan or NATO states.
4. No Dem, including F-35 lusting Bernie, is slashing the DoD budget in half. (Well, maybe AOC, but she's not been that specific yet.)
5. No Dem will get enough Dem support to truly undercut Panama Papers type money migrations.

AND, per the DNC, Sanders needs to sign an "I'm running as a Democrat" letter.

And next, speaking of Green-leaners?

I don't know if Texas Greens, or something like For a People's Party, will launch a ballot access petition drive next year. Robert Francis O'Rourke's heavy turnout in his almost race against Havana Ted Cruz bumped the petition signature numbers up massively.

So, I may vote in the Dem primary and vote Bernie. Assuming I do, there's no other Democrat I would vote for.

What happens in the general?

If the Greens don't nominate an antivaxxer, and said person is available by write-in, that's my choice. If the Greens DO nominate an antivaxxer, then I vote SPUSA by write-in, presuming that's available as it was in 2016.

If neither option is available, I keep moving further left if anybody besides Sanders is the nominee for the Dems. If he is the nominee, it's possible, but not guaranteed, that I vote for my first Dem for president this century.

Within the left hand of the duopoly, I don't know how big a deal it is that AOC hasn't immediately endorsed Sanders. A lot of home-state endorsements have been made for several announced candidates, and AOC may be kicking the tires on Kirsten Gillibrand.

Behind all of this is a reminder that not just now, but throughout American history, the left hand of the duopoly has often been #NotLeftEnough. So, third parties, such as today's Greens and SPUSA, have had a valuable role to play.

==

Sidebar: Late-stage capitalist Ted Rall is trying to grift on Bernie's announcement. Ted? Not close to true that you have stuff others won't reveal. I learned about Bernie's military Keynesianism on my own. I learned about Murray Bookchin's takedown of Bernie via Counterpunch. (Read also Bookchin's "Listen, Marxist." Go away.

==

Updates, Feb 26: Bernie's thin-skinnedness with the media — above all, Vermont local media — is well-documented for those who know his full history. For those who don't, Paul Heinz of Seven Days lays it out in a national platform.

Bernie has just had Tad Devine and other senior campaign staff from 2016 jump ship. It's not fatal; Reagan turned out better, overall, after John Sears left in 1980. But it is eyebrow-raising. But not shocking, if, as reported, Jane Sanders is behind it.

Bernie and Sandernistas vs Madcow Maddow: Gun control gets caught in the bow wash of twosiderism; Ignored: Bernie as Just.Another.Politician.™ on gunz

Arguably, one of the losers of the first pair of Democratic debates, at least in part, IMO, was Bernie Sanders for his answer on gun control when nailed by Madcow Maddow.

Gunz is generally NOT an issue to flub in a Democratic presidential debate:

Rachel Maddow: A "newspaper recently released portions of an interview you gave ...'My own view on guns is, everything being equal, states should make those decisions.'"

Bernie Sanders: "That's a mischaracterization of my thinking."

Maddow: "It's a quote of you." #DemDebate2 pic.twitter.com/sVoEQYSLwr

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) June 28, 2019

And, he got whacked over that immediately.

And, the secondary issues behind that are that Bernie appears inflexible, and that like other Just.Another.Politician.™ folks, he has trouble admitting he was wrong. It is also problematic in that this was semi-softball for being a "gotcha" question, it's a gotcha question that should have been anticipated and ...

Bernie was even dumb enough to brag about getting a D-minus rating from the Nazi Redneck Assholes. Anybody with a brain knows that if the NRA doesn't give you an F rating, there's something wrong.

And, there is something wrong. Guns, even from a Democratic POV, let alone a non-duopoly one, is Bernie's weakest domestic policy issue. He's gotten better, but still not gotten good.

So, I quote-tweeted that with some snark:

Bernie's answer on GUNZ and #GunControlNow was bad enough that, two hours after the #DemDebate2 David Sirota had yet to try to spin it away, other than by ignoring it. https://t.co/SDXdJ1Re8v

— reallyDonaldTrump  🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) June 28, 2019

Sirota finally responded to the issue on Twitter almost a full day after the debate, retweeting this:

Why lie about this, it's so easily fact-checked?

Bernie's career NRA ratings:
1992: D
1994: F
1996: F
1998: F
2000: F
2002: F
2004: D+
2006: C-
2012: D-
2018: F

If that were a GPA: 0.47 https://t.co/Vf1uCSH6dX

— wideofthepost (@wideofthepost) June 28, 2019

He's still, 48 hours after the debate, yet to direct tweet anything himself.

And, while some Berners admitted he had problems, let's see how much Bernie conspiracy theorists pop further out of, or into, the woodwork.

Or, let's let Politifact try to turd-polish Bernie, claiming that he was "mostly true" on his response to Madcow Maddow.

Oh, no he wasn't. That claim itself is at best mostly true and maybe half true.

Worse, the citation of a Seven Days in Vermont interview in support of this — the full interview, from which Madcow partially quoted — is at best half true and worst, mostly false.

Kit Norton, the Politifacter, also doesn't disclose that he works for Seven Days rival VT Digger. Nor does she note, which I and others who have been critical of Bernie on guns know, and which Seven Days mentions, that he supported giving gun makers immunity from lawsuits. That happened in key votes in 2005, in between his two best NRA ratings on that list above. No coincidence that.

Looking at Norton's Twitter bio, I suspect he has good self-motivated political reasons for turd-polishing. I also don't like that Politifact doesn't have tagline disclosures at the bottom of posts about who their 'facters" are. There's also the "we listened to audio" comment in the Politifact, which came off as semi-pretentious after I did the same. The audio isn't that long, and doesn't have any big "reveal"; that's part of the pretentiousness. and the royal "we" is itself pretentious.


Also "interesting" is that this is Politifact Vermont, not "Politifact National." And, Politifact Vermont is run in partnership with???

VTDigger, where Norton first posted this alleged fact-checking as a piece for VTDigger THEN got it run w/Politifact 17 minutes later.

And the partnership contains nobody else. No Seven Days. No Burlington Free Press. Nobody else. The partnership just started last October, so I don't know if Bernie would have gotten worse than a "Half true" in history. The national Politifact, though, has dinged him from time to time. 

There's the related issue that, while both VT Digger and Seven Days have been tough on Bernie at times, Seven Days has been more consistently tough, and has also often had a higher degree of toughness, especially on about anything and everything that Jane Sanders has had her fingers on. (Norton does link to Seven Days on both websites' pieces, perhaps to appear more neutral.)

I first saw the Politifact claims via Aaron Maté:

What a shocker that the DNC-aligned conspiracy theorist who moderated the presidential debate got the facts wrong about Bernie Sanders: https://t.co/cTUabaGNCm

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) July 3, 2019

And, I honestly wonder, to get to the end of the header, if he's not engaging in twosiderism because of Madcow Maddow peddling Russiagate.

I tweeted back to him and the quote-tweeted Faiz Shakir asking if either had read the Seven Days piece. I also asked if either knew of Norton's editorial background vis-a-vis Seven Days. 

Crickets.

Otherwise, of COURSE Faiz, as Bernie's campaign manager, is going to grasp at semi-turd polishing straws. You got anything to say about Seven Days' massive amounts of other Bernie (and Jane) stories over the last decade or so? I'm pretty familiar with many of them myself.

— reallyDonaldTrump  🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) July 4, 2019

And, since Faiz is Bernie's campaign manager, this was also tweeted back to them:

I've seen shitloads of twosiderism and whataboutism from left-liberals and leftists on Twitter in just the past two months.

So, let's do what Aaron, Faiz and Kit wouldn't do — actually look at the Seven Days piece, with text.

First unmentioned by Kit, from the Seven Days piece, is:

More damaging still could be the perception that, when it comes to guns, Sanders is not the paragon of principle he's reputed to be. His inconsistency on the issue suggests that his position has been driven by the politics of the moment — an uncharacteristic aberration for Sanders.

That’s reflected in his 1990 Congressional campaign against incumbent Peter Smith:

Then he took one last swing at Sanders. "In closing, I would say: Bernie, in the Free Press in 1988, you said gun control was a local issue," Smith said. "This is a federal issue. I'm delighted to see that you've come along..."

His press secretary in 1990, Steven Rosenfeld, follows, from a book he later wrote:

Later that day, Rosenfeld wrote in his book, Sanders called him to express unease about the role of firearms in the campaign. "It's an issue I do not feel comfortable about," he confided to his press secretary. "We want Mr. Philbin to do our dirty work for us."

Sounds like Just.Another.Politician.™ territory.

Then, there’s Bernie being plain old tone-deaf:

On October 25, 1991, a 30-year-old engineer named Elizabeth Teague brought a semiautomatic handgun to work at the Eveready Battery factory in Bennington, where she fatally shot 47-year-old plant manager Jonathan Perryman and wounded three other coworkers. Before fleeing the building, she set off several crude explosive devices consisting of gunpowder and gasoline. 

When Sanders traveled to Bennington two days later to address a labor forum, he couldn't escape questions about his vote earlier that year against the so-called Brady Bill, which required a seven-day waiting period for all handgun purchases, enabling states and localities to perform criminal background checks in the interim. In an interview following the forum, the first-term House member called the bloodshed in Bennington "tragic" — but he argued that the legislation would have done nothing to prevent it. The solution, he said, was to lift people out of poverty.

Really? So only poor people are gun nuts?

Meanwhile, when Bernie DID back a bill that the NRA opposed, it had plenty of pro-police gravy in it, all of which Bernie supported:

The following May, Sanders finally backed a bill the NRA opposed: an assault weapons ban similar to the one that had been his predecessor's undoing. The measure was later folded into a comprehensive crime bill that instituted a three-strikes policy for violent criminals, expanded use of the death penalty, and funded the hiring of new police officers and the building of new prisons. Sanders backed that, too.

Maybe he, like Hillary Clinton, was worried about superpredators.

Finally, his vote to support immunizing gun makers from lawsuits directly conflicts with his anti-corporate message:

The votes that would cause him the most political grief would be those, in 2003and 2005, for the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which prohibited lawsuits against gun manufacturers and retailers for the unlawful misuse of firearms.

And, at first, he didn’t even cite his “protect small local gun makers” angle that he later did. Rather, it was he didn’t think gun makers should be held liable, period.

Whether they should or not is one issue. Taking shifting, politically expedient explainers when you realize your original stance might be a problem is another.

The reality? Bernie's long-held "Vermont is a gun state" panders to the NRA, and did so across 20 years even as it moved the Overton Window rightward. There's nothing incompatible with being a "gun state" and proper regulation of guns.

I really encourage reading the whole piece.

I also encourage you to trust Politifact less and not just on Bernie.

In multiple other state verticals, I noticed, Politifact partners with just one newspaper. And Wisconsin, North Carolina, Florida and New York are all much bigger. Weirder yet, it works with an online-only for the Pennsylvania version, and one that appears to be about arts events first.

Of course, Politifact comes from the Poynter / Tampa Bay St. Petersburg Times combo. The real problem is that there seems to be no rhyme or reason for why Politifact has partnered with particular papers, and with just single newspapers in all these states. In other states on its list, it has partnered with public broadcast media in a couple of cases, a university in one, and a good-government type nonprofit in another.

==

Beyond that, though he's writing about the Washington Post's fact checkers, and about them versus Sanders as being too radical, Jeet Heer's cautions can be extended beyond that. Politically weaponizing fact checking is a dangerous proposition. In this particular case, he says it can give Trump an opening to questioning the whole enterprise.

Tis true both ways, Jeet. Spin-doctoring fact checking in Bernie's favor, as I have just pointed out, does the same thing.

#FeelTheBern or feel the scorched earth from the #DemCaucus after the #IowaCaucus?

Bernie Sanders, as anybody who was alive, awake and following American politics last night knows, got a tie and a moral win out of the Iowa caucuses, despite desperate mainstream media spinning, including huge chunks of spinning and framing from allegedly neutral — but not really so — data-crunching analysts, above all Nate Silver and his gang at 538.

None of this should be a surprise; I called out Silver, and his chief rival, Sam Wang, in advance of the Iowa caucus. And, in its aftermath, Wang is STILL spinning. And, he deleted the post to which I originally linked. No worries, Sam; I found the cached version. Disgusting.

So, folks, now that we've made clear that the data crunchers are actually data massagers, let's look on to New Hampshire.

The Bern is there to be felt. And, as I noted in the blog post where I called out Silver and Wang before seeing that Wang had deleted that post, Sanders has the chance to build momentum. Per that piece, he's already starting to poll better among African-Americans, doing a fair amount of gap closure. And also per that piece, Democratic superdelegates are not locked in stone. Both Silver and Wang were claiming Sanders had to "win big" because of all the delegates she already had.

And, in spite of me Tweeting that to 538, it's STILL spinning about "only whites are supporting Bernie."

Well, both of them, and others, are either ignorant, forgetful, or lying. And, frankly, I'm saying that it's lying with both of them. Also per that same link, Clinton had a lead of more than 100 superdelegates over Obama going into the 2008 Iowa caucus, and that was with her being less of a quasi-incumbent than now, and with Obama in far stronger standing coming into Iowa than Sanders was this year.

And, yet, the Clintonista spinning, and outright lying about who spent more in Iowa, continues, from ground-level Clintonists, not just the MSM.

For the reality, rather than the lie about outsider money collected so far, see that image at left, from an Open Secrets spreadsheet. For related info, including about MSM Clintonista spinning on the money issue, go here.

For the fact that Clinton spent $1.5 million more than Sanders on Iowa advertising, go here.

In other words, rank-and-file Clintonistas are spreading and exacerbating, to the point of outright lying, about both spending and fundraising in Iowa.

This is why I blogged yesterday morning about how many Clintonistas think her shit (and apparently theirs) don't stink.

Let's get back to the bigger picture of the slog Sanders faced, compared to 2008.

Bernie Sanders does not come from a state neighboring Iowa, unlike Barack Obama.

Bernie Sanders was not "anointed" and given a prime speaking spot at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, unlike Barack Obama in 2004.

Bernie Sanders was not a presumed presidential candidate at the start of 2015, unlike Barack Obama at the start of 2007.

And yes, Sanders did what he did in Iowa last night.

Don't let the Silvers and Wangs of the world try to spin this.

Remember that Nate Silver is very much MSM. Worked at the New York Times for years, then went to ESPN, which is part of the Disney/ABC empire. Not much more mainstream media than that, is there. Wang works at an Ivy League university, the academic equivalent of MSM-dom.

I've called Silver out in the past for other things, too. That started shortly after he opened his 538 luggage at ESPN, when he hired Roger Pielke Jr., a known climate change skeptic, as a contributing writer, and Pielke did just what you thought in such a position, as I detail here. Silver then claimed to be listening to his critics, which I took with several skeptical grains of salt, and do so even more, now. He's never really apologized for that piece, and never really turned his data crunching to the seriousness of climate change. I then slapped him over a writer's inflation piece that sounded very Clintonista.

In that blog post that he hauled down, before he hauled it down, Wang responded to me, and said that "win big" was by 10 percentage points. It's clear that he's spinning even bigger than Silver, if that's possible.

So, yes, remember that, as we move ahead, that the data crunchers are data spinners.

Speaking of, that might be why Millennials (which make up a large chunk of Sanders support) are growing more distrustful of news media. (That said, from what I've seen, many can still be suckers for corporate branding on social media.)

Now, back to feeling the Bern, or feeling the scorched earth.

We've got a town hall on Wednesday, then a debate on Thursday. Especially with Martin O'Malley dropping out of the race, and this, like 2008, a two-person contest from here on out, Clinton's going to go scorched earth in some way, shape or form. It will be through surrogates as much as possible, but she'll do some of it at the debate. Bernie, whether it's getting blunter about issues with her private email, or whatever, needs to be ready to fire back, and to do so beyond his 1-note trumpet, IMO.

Meanwhile, one scene from Clinton 2008 may already be surfacing again: sniping within the campaign. Shades of 2008 again, the sniping also includes Bill.

And, in non-partisan news within the Democrats, the Iowa Democratic Party looks like kind of a clusterfuck right now. Temporary precinct chairs? Precincts still not called?

Update: One caveat, beyond minority polling. Ronald Brownstein, usually a pretty insightful guy, and I'm not seeing him spinning in this, notes that Sanders pulled a lot of his votes from independents. Both the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary allow crossovers. How Bernie does in straight-up Democratic primaries, so-called closed primaries?

Bernie Sanders and Vermont political affiliation: #hypocrisy?

Bernie Sanders

Given that Bernie Sanders staff has come out and said "Yes, he's really a Democrat," is it fair to ask if the "Independent" political label he gives himself as a senator is at least in part a façade? Or more than just that?

I say yes, it's at least fair to ask.

Per the link, Vermont, like many states, does not require political registration to vote. So that's how Sanders claims to be an Independent, even though he's repeatedly also run in Democratic primaries, just to scare off independent Democratic challengers, pun very intended.

That pun is very intended. Per the link, yes, Sanders has a cordial, or more than cordial, link with the state's Democratic party.

Per previous blogging by me, in exchange for such cordiality, the Vermont Democratic Party has regularly quashed would-be challengers to Sanders. That would include him running in Democratic primaries as needed, as explicitly noted by Vermont's alt-weekly. (The paper is a good, straightforward, and skeptical when needed eye on Sanders, for people interested in him, but like me, always bringing a skeptical eye to politics. Bookmark its Bernie Beat.)

So, it is a façade. Next question is, how big, and how hypocritical?

My answer? At least moderately big, if not more, and mildly to moderately hypocritical. Sanders is to the left of most national Democrats, but by no means all. California Sen. Barbara Boxer, I would put to the left of Sanders, for example. She's not been as outspoken on Wall Street as him, but, she's not a semi-gun nut nor a semi-war hawk.

As for 2016 and my plans? If Sanders is still in the race by the time the Democratic primaries get here to Tejas, I'll certainly vote for him. But, should he somehow get the nomination, which I doubt, I'll still vote for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party, if she's nominated again, or any other reasonable Green Party nominee.

Friend PDiddie posted on Twitter that Hillary Clinton has already sewed up, or nearly so, some 500 Democratic superdelegates. Sanders is no babe in the woods; he knew this was likely before he ran. (It's also why Joe Biden made his candidatus interruptus permanent.)

But, that's also why I say he semi-castrated himself when he said he wouldn't run as an independent (I presume that includes rejecting a Green Party run) if not nominated as a Democrat. It didn't surprise me much then and it surprises me even less now. The announcement doesn't surprise me at all; the lack of thinking about political leverage surprises me somewhat, but also makes me wonder just how much of a strategic political thinker Sanders is, or is not.

As for the labels? Per Vermont law, and per the reasoning and claims of Sanders' staff, he could slap all sorts of labels on himself besides "Independent." He could be the "Brooklynite" senator from Vermont, or the "Mormonism" senator from Vermont or whatever.

Of course, "Independent" plays to stereotypical rock-ribbed New England values. Right, Howard Dean?

Gary Johnson, Jill Stein and Bernie Sanders aren't CLOSE to alike (Update: Neither are Sanders and Ted Cruz)

On Friday, the Green Party tweeted a report saluting Jill Stein's recount.

I immediately replied that:
A. It was NOT unbiased, given the recount was done in states that flopped to Trump only, and that I (and other concerned Greens) had blogged about this, including noting that blue-state Minnesota and New Hampshire were as close as any of the red states recounted. Beyond that, the election was not rigged in that sense.
B. That I didn't really trust Contrails Bob Fitrakis (author of the piece) for much of anything. That includes him, David Cobb, and other Stein legal beagles raking decent money for their recount services. Given that Fitrakis has raised such election conspiracy theories before, I believe he has a legal, fiduciary and ethical conflict of interest in serving as a lawyer in such cases. More about Contrails Bob's background here.

I later added that I was far from alone in concern A, and included the point that the Green Party executive committee did NOT unanimously approve the recount, which was Stein's, not the party's. But, don't let me say that. Let Dr. Margaret Flowers say that.

As a sidebar, I find it troubling that the Green Party is retweeting this when we're 3.5 years away from the next presidential election and said election, it must be highly hoped, will have a better candidate than Stein, and will NOT have ANY AccommoGreen candidate willing to play footsies with Dems. As it is, this is very close to Dems electing Tom Perez as new party chairman and pretending that Bernie Sanders, and the backing for his stances, didn't exist.

As part of this, I first ran into a Tweeter called "JillOrBernie." After giving him/her/it smackdown as a #Berniecrat, complete with hashtag, in a couple of comments, I then muted him/her/it. Muted, not blocked.

Said smackdown included pointing out I was not alone in such issues, and that's NOT limited to the lack of party executive unanimity for the recount. I pointed out the likes of Mark Lause in Fitzrakis' own Ohio and his extensive concerns for the Green Party.

Next, I ran into another Tweeter called GrLibertarian, who is the subject of this title. He/she/it (presumably male, given Libertarian trends) provoked this mini-Tweetstorm.

The Venn diagram of the overlap of policy positions of Gary Johnson, Jill Stein and Bernie Sanders is quite small! Bernie's a warhawk. 1/3

— @RealDonaldTrump (@SocraticGadfly) May 20, 2017

I then realized I would need four, not three Tweets:

Gary Johnson strongly opposes #singlepayer, against US fighting #climatechange; GJ also against ANY minimum wage; backs school vouchers 2/4

— @RealDonaldTrump (@SocraticGadfly) May 20, 2017

And the third:

Jill Stein is for gun control; opposes all GMOs; Bernie Sanders lusts for F-35s, hates BDS; is bipartisan foreign policy establishment 3/4

— @RealDonaldTrump (@SocraticGadfly) May 20, 2017

Then, finally, and forgetting to number it:

Therefore, likes of .@GrLibertarian who claim to support all three of Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein & Gary Johnson are #politicallyclueless

— @RealDonaldTrump (@SocraticGadfly) May 20, 2017

And then muted GrLibertarian.

In turn, this reminds me of how much some other Greens talk up Rand and/or Ron Paul. Even if Rand is sincere in his criminal justice reform, he may still be half the racist his dad is which is 10 times too much. Plus, libertarians small-l and capital-L alike and gutting our regulatory state, etc.

And, these aren't Greens who are Berniecrats in conversion, even. They've include those as active with the party as I am or more. And, I highly doubt libertarians, especially capital-L party members, say, "Cool, Jill Stein agrees with us on something."

Between the GP officially taking a stance/take it shouldn't have, conspiracy theorists abounding among members, and more, I will, I hope, at least for the 2020 presidential campaign, keep my eyes peeled on the Socialist Party USA as needed.

Update, June 14, 2017: Add to the world of cluelessness.

Yes, you read that correctly. Someone who backed both Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz. That's from this Newsweek story about James T. Hodgkinson, the alleged shooter of House Majority Whip Steve Scalise.

LinkedIn has now pulled that profile offline, lending substance to Newsweek's tentative identification.

Via Mark Ames of Exiled Online, Hodgkinson also, like Reality Winner, apparently got delusionally sucked into the "Putin Did It" trap.

Why does the media hate #BernieSanders?

Sen. Bernie Sanders

I have documented some of my own concerns about Bernie Sanders. They include the fact that he's a gun nut, wants the state of Vermont to suck off the military-industrial complex teat (and in general might not be quite so progressive on foreign policy as I'd like), and that these concerns are enough that if the Green Party ran a legit candidate, like Jill Stein again, I'd likely still vote Green versus Bernie, if he were to win the Democratic nomination. (And please participate in the poll at right about actual and rumored 2016 Democratic presidential candidates.)

However, while critiquing myth vs. reality on his positions, I don't diss the man as a candidate. I wouldn't diss him if he were a Green candidate, and certainly not as a Democratic candidate.

Unlike the New York Times and others, who have dissed him indeed, as Columbia Journalism Review reports in depth.

Let's start with how the Old Gray Lady buried his official campaign announcement:

The Times, for example, buried his announcement on page A21, even though every other candidate who had declared before then had been put on the front page above the fold. Sanders’s straight-news story didn’t even crack 700 words, compared to the 1,100 to 1,500 that Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and Hillary Clinton got. So, one-half the coverage, buried wayyyy inside. 

The bigger issue is the Times, as part of the “mainstream media,” already engaging in crafting of narratives.

Chief of those? “He can’t win.” Why? Erm, he’s a “socialist”!

Sanders, of course, is Vermont’s junior senator, barber’s worst nightmare, and IKEA socialist (he favors the term “democratic socialist,” as in the Scandinavian variant), who quaintly maintains that people and the planet are more important than profit. Not long ago such beliefs fell well within the waters of the main stream where politicians swam, but the current has since been rerouted, and Sanders now paddles hard against the left bank. For not going with the flow, and for challenging Hillary Clinton, the big fish many elites have tagged as their own, Sanders’s entry into the race was greeted with story after story whose message—stated or understated, depending on the decorum of the messenger—was “This crank can’t win.”

That’s of course crowning Hillary long enough for harpyish spinster Maureen Dowd, among others, to then dethrone her.

Steve Hendricks, in this excellent piece, then notes more bullshit. First, it’s a lot of the MSM trying to horsecollar Sanders with the “can’t win” label, and thus dissing him:

Other major news organizations ignored Sanders as nearly as they could a sitting U.S. senator who entered the presidential race. ABC’s World News Tonight gave his announcement all of 18 seconds, five of which were allotted to Clinton’s tweet welcoming him to the race. CBS Evening News fitted the announcement into a single sentence at the end of a two-minute report about Clinton.

But it doesn’t stop there.

Hendricks continues:

In past races, when editors have explained why they scorned the likes of Sanders, they have tended to recite an editorial recipe for political long shots that is much like the Hollywood recipe for starlets: don’t cover them much, and don’t take them seriously. The trouble with this commonplace is that editors actually love covering long shots—certain long shots anyway. Ted Cruz, for example, received his serious, in-depth treatment in the Times’ news columns even as its analysts were writing pieces like “Why Ted Cruz Is Such A Long Shot.”

So, there you go.

Well, why not cover Sanders? Because, on the economic side, he is indeed a democratic socialist, and the NYT, other than letting Paul Krugman grace its op-ed pages, is a capitalist corporation, which is beholden to the standard capitalist narratives of the NY-DC axis. Hendricks notes:

The difference is that Cruz has not erected a platform whose planks present a boardwalk of horror to the corporate class atop the media. These same planks of Sanders’s, not at all incidentally, are the very ones on which Clinton most wobbles as she stands before Democratic voters.

Exactly.

 Can he win?

It's more likely than the mainstream media might admit.

Remember a junior state senator from Illinois who ran against a seemingly undefeatable person, name of Hillary Clinton, eight years ago? Sure, Barack Obama has more charisma than Bernie Sanders. Or does he, that much?

Besides, Hendricks notes Ted Kennedy running his front-runnerness in the 1972 run-up off an island bridge and into murky waters; Paul Wellstone's fateful 2002 plane crash, Jimmy Carter trumping favorites with shoe leather and a somewhat faked smile, and more.

He also notes that Sanders got off to a decent fundraising start and Clinton's suddenly gotten coy about details of her latest financials. Hendricks didn't even note Sanders' early crowd draws in Iowa. Hardly the sign of someone who can't win, on Sanders' part.

So, read the whole thing from CJR. It's worth it.

Beyond that, as Teddy White belatedly admitted, but only after helping create Camelot, there's a sort of ethical issue withe media getting too involved with creating "narratives" about politicians.

UPDATE, June 8: Add National Journal to the haters. Its 2014 piece implies, as have some others, that Sanders is somehow anti-black because he wants to try to get working-class whites to vote Democratic. Joan Walsh at Salon made the same claim just a week ago.

At the same time, I would bash Walsh less than Doug Henwood does. Race and class issues do overlap, but yes, they're not the same. It's kind of like environmentalism. A lot of environmental issues aren't out in national parks, but are about industrial companies building toxic plants in urban areas in neighborhoods that aren't just low-income, but are also high-minority. And yet, the environmental movement in general remains largely white.

Classism and racism overlap, in other words, but they're not the same thing. And, Walsh notes that our first post-racial president's stance that American needed to "look forward" is itself a problem.