Clinton worried that more people are ‘Feeling the Bern’

The hot news in presidential elections this week has been the rise in the polls of Bernie Sanders that has seriously challenged Hillary Clinton’s air of inevitability as the eventual Democratic nominee. Her past policy positions, some of which like her warmongering and pro-Wall Street and pro-oligarchy stances, are distasteful to the more activist and progressive members of the Democratic party. These people are rallying around Sanders and the movement has been such that even the pundit class, many of whom were ignoring the Democratic race because it seemed like she was a shoo-in, are now sitting up and taking notice.
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Cruz’s birther challenge gets more interesting

The issue about Ted Cruz’s eligibility to be president seems to be having much greater staying power than I had anticipated. Donald Trump has been making it an issue sufficiently strongly that Cruz has felt obliged to even release his mother’s birth certificate. For me at least, it initially seemed like a chance just to make fun of Republicans who find themselves hoist with their own petard, the tables turned on them after they raised such a big fuss over president Obama’s eligibility. But with Cruz, the issue has suddenly taken a rather more serious turn due to recent developments.
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How my views align with the various candidates

I came across this online questionnaire that asks you for your opinion on various issues and then lets you know how well you align with the various candidates running for president in the different policy areas and overall. It is more sophisticated than most such things since it not only asks you for multiple choice responses to various questions, it also asks you how strongly you feel about the issue. What I particularly liked was that it provides more nuanced options if you don’t find the first pair of binary options satisfactory, which I often didn’t.
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Koch money speaks louder than Koch words

Charles and David Koch are billionaire industrialists who have used their vast wealth to launch major campaigns at the local, state, and federal levels to influence (read ‘buy’) legislators so that they can get legislation passed that advances their own interests. They do this by contributing to contributing to candidates directly or through Super PACs, creating and supporting so—called think tanks that advance their interests, funding lobbying groups that work ceaselessly on their behalf, and in any other way that they can think of.
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Sanders has a great discussion with The Nightly Show panel

The last segment of The Nightly Show features the evening’s guest joining Larry Wilmore and a selected panel of (usually) comedians to discuss a current issue. The weakness of the segment has been that the topic often had no connection to the background or expertise of the guest. But last week Wilmore had Bernie Sanders again on his show and they had an extended discussion on the issues that Sanders is addressing and it was an informative discussion, funny and yet serious.
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The Oregon militants should not be allowed to avoid prosecution

There are mixed reports coming out of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Burns, Oregon where a group of armed people have taken over the property in the name of the ‘people’, to ‘restore the constitution’, ‘fight government tyranny’ and all the other things that get right-wing paramilitary groups get all fired up. Tim Dickinson has been following events closely and gives us some background on some of the members of this group.
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Are the Oregon militia members too dangerous to laugh at?

I often succumb to the temptation to mock, or relay the mocking by others, of the efforts of the extreme right wing fanatics who speak with such a loud voice in US politics. Matt Taibbi, while also laughing at the antics of the armed people who have taken over a remote wildlife refuge in Oregon as a stand against government tyranny, addresses the question as to whether this is a good thing.
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The presidential candidates’ religious affiliations

Religion is playing a major role in this year’s Republican primary race, as it generally does in almost every recent election. Nancy T. Ammerman studies the role of religion in politics and has catalogued the religious affiliations of the various candidates and their degrees of dedication to taking past in formal religious observances.
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The Republican reaction to Obama’s gun control measures

Needless to say, there has been a lot of negative reaction from the Republican party and Fox News to president Obama’s modest proposals to curb gun violence. Part of the reason is that they and others are in thrall of the gun lobby. But part of it is undoubtedly because they simply hate Obama and have gone all out to discredit him and oppose anything that he advocates, unless it benefits the oligarchy. This time they focused their ire and poured scorn on, of all things, the tear that he shed when talking about the deaths of elementary school children in Newtown.
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