Bernie Sanders wins the New Hampshire primary

Bernie Sanders has been declared the winner of the New Hampshire primary but his margin of victory over second-place finisher Pete Buttigieg was small 25.70% to 24.45%. While the turnout in the earlier Iowa primary narrowly beat the 2016 numbers but was disappointingly smaller than the record 2008 levels, this year’s New Hampshire turnout will beat 2008 and set a new record.

However Sanders won 51% of the youth vote aged 18-29, showing that his ideas resonate with future generations of voters. He alsowon nearly half the voters under 30 in Iowa.

To me the big surprise is that Amy Klobuchar did so well, winning close to 20% of the vote and beating out Elizabeth Warren who finished fourth with less than 10% and Joe Biden who finished fifth with about 8%. I read earlier that Klobuchar polls showed she had won a large share of the women’s vote and that her increase came at the expense of Warren and Biden but cannot find that link now. Since you need 15% of the vote to be awarded any delegates, the latter two will leave New Hampshire empty-handed.
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Rebuffing phony critiques of the Sanders program

Today is the New Hampshire primary and one can sense a panic in the political establishment and the corporate media that Bernie Sanders will do well there. Hence they are going into overdrive to make the case that he is an ‘extremist’ and an ‘ideologue’ and that his ideas are not ‘practical’. In this effort they are aided by the Democratic party establishment and its party hacks like James Carville who has made a good career out of talking like your average Joe while promoting the interests of the oligarchy. They are clearly hoping that most of the party voters will coalesce around Joe Biden or Pete Buttigieg or with the late addition of Amy Klobuchar to the mix, as the person to stop Sanders and are clearly promoting this view.
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Why is Lipinski still supported by the Democratic party?

I have railed before about congressman Dan Lipinski who since 2004 has represented a very safe Democratic seat in the 3rd district of Illinois that he ‘inherited’ from his father. i.e., his father held it for a long time and stepped aside for his son to take it. Lipinski has had the support of the Democratic party despite the fact that his views are pretty much close to Republican positions on key issues. He is anti-LGBT and anti-women and he gets funding from the petroleum industry and big corporations.
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NOW argues against full decriminalization of sex work

I have written before about how I felt that sex work should be decriminalized. Although there had been concern in feminists circles in days gone by that legalizing sex work would lead to greater exploitation of women’s bodies, I thought that the issue had been settled and that decriminalizing sex work was now a fairly uncontroversial position on the part of people who would consider themselves on the liberal and progressive end of the political spectrum. In fact, just a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a new survey that gave welcome news that public opinion about sex work had moved in a positive direction.
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Speech pathologist argues that Donald Trump has aphasia

It is clear that when Donald Trump speaks extemporaneously, he goes off at weird tangents and finds it hard to sustain a coherent train of thought, meandering all over the place, laced with non-sequiturs. A retired speech pathologist says that when you analyze his speeches and compare them with the way he spoke long ago, that it is clear that he has a serious language disorder called aphasia.
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Yesterday’s Democratic debate

I watched most of the debate yesterday and there was little there to change my mind about my support for Bernie Sanders as my #1 choice followed by Elizabeth Warren as #2. The rest were pretty much a wash, though I thought that Amy Klobuchar and Tom Steyer had a pretty good night. Elizabeth Warren got relatively little speaking time and while she made use of her time to make her points, did not seem aggressive enough in injecting herself more into the exchanges.
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So much for the awfulness of foreign interference in elections

In the US there has been an outpouring of outrage, especially from the Democratic party establishment, condemning foreign (read Russian) interference in the elections and warning of more attempts this year too. I think it is safe to say that everyone agrees that countries should steer clear of other nations’ elections, though in this internet age and the rise of social media that might well be a forlorn hope because private and quasi-private entities can meddle in many ways. It has reached the stage where any glitch in the process, any irregularity at all, is immediately pointed to as possible sabotage by foreign agents.
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Judge uses RFRA to throw out conviction of humanitarians

You may recall the case of Scott Warren of the humanitarian group No More Deaths who was charged by the federal government because he provided food, water, clothing, and shelter to the undocumented people who crossed the southern border and then undertook a grueling and dangerous trek through the desert. A jury acquitted him of all those charges but in a different case a judge found him guilty on a misdemeanor charge of illegally operating a motor vehicle in a wilderness area in the course of delivering the supplies.
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Presidential Medals of Freedom

Conan O’Brien thinks that Donald Trump has the right idea in giving the highest honor that a president can give to a civilian to war-mongering, possibly draft-dodging, conspiracy-mongering, right-wing radio talk show blowhard Rush Limbaugh. Why reserve these medals just for people who have done something good or honorable? Why not freely distribute them to supporters, like the pens used at signing ceremonies or the t-shirts fired into the crowds at basketball games?