Bernie Sanders continues to draw huge crowds, the largest of any candidate in either party, the latest event being in Boston that had over 30,000 people attending inside the Convention Center with the overflow crowd watching on a TV screen in the cold, wet outdoors.
He has also taken on with vigor the issues of racism, police abuses, and the need for sensible gun laws, something that he had been criticized for earlier for not addressing more specifically.
Bernie Sanders decried “an institutional racism that allows and continues to allow unarmed African Americans to be killed by police” on Saturday night, as he preached to a huge crowd in Boston that welcomed the Democratic presidential candidate’s now familiar vision of “political revolution”.
Sanders alluded to a string of high-profile police killings of unarmed black people, and to a subsequent series of grand jury decisions not to indict officers involved in some cases.
“It is not easy being a cop today,” Sanders told the crowd. “Many of them are underpaid, their schedules are terrible, and their family life is very stressful.
“But like any other public official when a police officer breaks the law that officer must be held accountable.”
…Sanders’ apparent decision to embrace the cause of burgeoning civil rights movement, loosely organized under the banner Black Lives Matter, comes weeks after activists upstaged the senator at one of his own campaign events.
He has since pursued the cause more avidly than any other candidate, and sought to join the energy of that movement with the surge in popularity, especially among young people, of his own campaign.
(You can go to Sanders’s website to join the campaign and contribute and here to see where he stands on the issues. Despite the media trying to paint him as some kind of extremist candidate, a majority of Americans actually support him on most of the issues he stands for.)
Good for Bernie Sanders. Nice to see him getting behind the Black Lives Matter movement now.
I still think he’s almost certainly still unelectable and pretty definitely won’t win the Democratic Party nomination representing as he does the Far Left wing of the Democratic party base (the opposite but equivalent of the Republicans Tea Party klowns -- much nicer people natch!) rather than the political centre but he may well have some influence on the Underton / Overton window and getting some good ideas out there.
I am Sanders supporter, but I am getting these odd feeling about sanders lately. It’s kind of like obama in the making when it comes to foreign policy. He wanted middle eastern country to fight the iraq syria war, now he is for arming the rebels, wtf happened to his previous position it’s enough to send arms to people in the ME, which always ends up in the hands of bad people ? Oh, I get it, russia happened. Even before elected he is siding with neocons, think if he is in office in which obviously always controlled by neocons.
And when it comes to gun control, he is just disingenuous. Now his key stump talk he, “let stop shouting each other”, which essentially means, stop asking me why I opposed Bradee Bill and supported gun manufacturing corporations not the people and victims, those who wants the gun control should shut up and only talk about the assault rifles ban, background check, ah, include mental health problem as cause for gun violence.
Gosh, F-in he sounded like democratic-republican gun nuts. So, he will only care if the no of people exceeds 10 or more, and if it is in major news network for round the clock, he won’t give a F if it’s 4 people or less, if it’s not in major for-profit news entertainment network.
You cannot solve gun violence in cities, if you have unregulated unlimited supply of guns in rural areas.
Ah, and his favorite stump talks, how most developed nations has healthcare, free college, voting rights, but he won’t look at the same developed countries when it comes to gun controls, what F-in bulls&^% is he selling.
The more he talks about guns, foreign policy and isreal it just all over 2008 again, just talk, then business as usual.
Ah, and I have few words for people who called themselves and supports “Centrist”. What the F-in centrist supposedly means ? 50% of americans people support some policy or 60% ? the left and right fringes are 10% or 20% ? I even respect those tea party right winger hate groups, they are honest about what they believe in, but the F-in so called centrist, particularly the so called liberal centrist, they are the sycophants to ruling and rich class. What centrist means is -- anything that is ok with plutocracy, the riches, if anything that questions the status quo of the riches then you are left fringe, it doesn’t matter if 60% -- 70% of the people support, but you have to be a sycophants to be centrist. The cowards and sycophants who worship dynasties, celebrities, greed, plutocracy, oligarchy, are the real F-in “political centre”
@ ^ atheistblog : “Ah, and I have few words for people who called themselves and supports “Centrist”. What the F-in centrist supposedly means ?”
Centrist = Neither left wing or rightwing but more towards or in the political centre.
Ie. between & betwixt (I know tautology -- & also emphasis) the ideologies and political positions of the (political , metaphorical) far right and far left.
Not at either end of the political spectrum but sorta in the middle. Y’know the Bell curve graph’s centre at the peak not either “tail” :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_function
Sheesh, didn’t think that would be a hard idea to immediately grasp!
Nor does it convey any ethical implication just a reasonable political analysis that whilst the Parties appeal to each “tail” of the curve getting the majority vote in a Democracy requires the winner to get the most of those centrally positioned because, well, look at the graph and use your mind’s eye to colour in the respective volumes.
FWIW I fall generally on the far left of the political bell curve myself. Which doesn’t and shouldn’t blind me or others of the fact that the majority lie closer to the centre and thus further right than we do. I also disagree with following all of Leftwing ideology on everything just because its left wing because y’know there’s this brain thing in my skull that says I can and should think and decide for myself not follow some political peer group or check list. 999
StevoR, the US political spectrum does not look like a Gausian function. Over the last decade or so it has become a lot more like a bimodal distribution -- a function with two distinct peaks. There aren’t that many people in the center anymore. Also, the center itself is way to the right of where it used to be.
StevoR, an idea: perhaps Sanders WILL become “electable” once we learn to stop repeating and reinforcing the narrative that he’s “unelectable.”