Great "error" page for Bernie Sanders. Love the Brooklyn accent that he's never lost.
TPM:
For Democrats who had hoped to lure Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren into a presidential campaign, independent Sen. Bernie Sanders might be the next best thing.
Sanders, who is opening his official presidential campaign Tuesday in Burlington, Vermont, aims to ignite a grassroots fire among left-leaning Democrats wary of Hillary Rodham Clinton. He is laying out an agenda in step with the party's progressive wing and compatible with Warren's platform — reining in Wall Street banks, tackling college debt and creating a government-financed infrastructure jobs program.
"I think our views are parallel on many, many issues," Sanders said in an interview with The Associated Press, describing Warren as a "good friend."
Ryan Cooper:
In democracy, the voters decide who wins a presidential election. But the media has great influence over which candidates get serious consideration. So when it comes to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and the 2016 race, it's clear that he's getting a raw deal. It's long since time the press gave him the respect he deserves.
Jay Rosen, the New York University journalism professor, has a useful concept for describing the ideology of journalists: nested spheres of legitimacy. These have to do with the way ideas are presented in a piece of journalism. The idea of women's suffrage is presented as non-controversial, thus placed in the "sphere of consensus." The idea that aliens control the government, say, is presented as nuts, thus placed in the "sphere of deviance." The latter ideas are openly presented in the news as illegitimate or insane, if they are not ignored altogether.
What ideas go in which sphere is an inescapable part of journalism, though most reporters don't acknowledge they're doing it. And at the moment, the idea of Bernie Sanders as a candidate is getting placed in the deviant sphere.
More politics and policy (and more Bernie) below the fold.
Dylan Byers:
Yet when that senator announced his intention to run, late last month, the news was buried on page A21 of The New York Times, despite the fact that almost every other campaign launch, including Cruz's, was featured prominently on page A1. The Washington Post began a profile of the "unlikely presidential candidate" by labeling him "an ex-hippie, septuagenarian socialist from the liberal reaches of Vermont who rails, in his thick Brooklyn accent, rumpled suit and frizzy pile of white hair, against the ‘billionaire class’ taking over the country." By Tuesday, it had dubbed his bid "by-all-accounts-doomed."
These examples of Bernie Sanders' treatment -- or mistreatment -- by the American media were flagged last week by the Columbia Journalism Review, and addressed again on Tuesday by The Week. The concern: That the same press corps that monitors Hillary Clinton's every move and marvels at every Republican hopeful's most minor statements has already written Sanders out of the 2016 campaign.
NY Times:
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont began drawing implicit contrasts with Hillary Rodham Clinton on Thursday in the race for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, as he played the liberal purist in throwing down policy gauntlet after gauntlet – a $15 minimum wage, $1 trillion for public works jobs, a “Medicare-for-all” system of universal health care — in his first campaign rally since declaring his candidacy last month.
While he referred to Mrs. Clinton by name only once, Mr. Sanders, an avowed socialist and former mayor of this bucolic sanctuary for political progressives, took so many emphatic and uncompromising stands that he made Mrs. Clinton look like a pretender for her recent shifts to the left on gay marriage and free trade. At the same time, however, Mr. Sanders offered nothing in the way of strategies for getting his left-wing policy ideas through the politically gridlocked Congress — other than promising (like generations of candidates have) to “build a movement of millions of Americans who are prepared to stand up and fight back.”
Mr. Sanders spoke before an adoring crowd of several thousand on the edge of Lake Champlain.
“Let’s be clear: This campaign is not about Bernie Sanders, it is not about Hillary Clinton, it is not about Jeb Bush or anyone else. This campaign is about the needs of the American people,” he said.
Left wing? You mean mainstream policy ideas, NYT.
I'm not in Bernie's camp, but I can understand why folks hate political reporters.
Here's another example of what Ryan Cooper is talking about.
Politico:
These weren’t your everyday Americans who came out to support Bernie Sanders on Tuesday.
The self-described democratic socialist kicked off his long-shot run for the White House in his adopted hometown of Burlington, Vt., a lakeside city full of characters who might not have passed the pre-selection process for Hillary Clinton’s tour of roundtables.
And while Sanders, the state’s independent U.S. senator, may be way behind in national presidential polls, in Burlington, he’s a local hero.
Let's marginalize him rather than talk about his issues. Nice job, Politico.
Marcy Wheeler sets us straight on the Patriot Act.
I wanted to provide some background of how we got to this week’s PATRIOT Reauthorization debate to explain what I believe the surveillance boosters are really aiming for. Rather than a response to Edward Snowden, I think it is more useful to consider “reform” as an Intelligence Community effort to recreate functionalities they had and then lost in 2009.
Even floods and horrible downpours can do some good. Look at the average water level in
Lake Travis, TX.
Total 30 Day Rise/Fall: 25.89 feet
Ron Fournier:
The complex and sordid DuMond case, which I covered from Arkansas in the late 1980s and early 1990s, has always struck me as a window into Huckabee's judgment as chief executive. Convinced that DuMond had experienced a religious awakening in prison, the former Baptist minister defended a sexual predator—defying public opinion and common sense to side with a vocal minority of evangelicals.
That might ring a bell. Today, the GOP presidential candidate is standing behind the Duggar family of Arkansas following the admission by eldest son Joshua Duggar that he molested children, including his own siblings, as a teenager. "No purpose whatsoever is served by those who are now trying to discredit Josh or his family by sensationalizing the story," Huckabee wrote in a Facebook post. "Good people make mistakes and do regrettable and even disgusting things."
Kudos to Huckabee for embracing forgiveness, a virtue sorely lacking in public life. While I could be snarky and ask whether he still thinks homosexual couples shouldn't raise children, I don't think hypocrisy is the issue as much as judgment.
Taken with the DuMond case, Huckabee's full-throated defense of the Duggars fits the pattern of a thin-skinned leader blinded by faith and opportunism.
Tim Alberta:
In the six years since launching his Florida Senate campaign, Rubio has become an adopted prince of South Carolina's political royalty. And not by chance. Rubio, whose national ambitions became apparent even before he was sworn into the Senate, quickly identified South Carolina as the home base for his eventual presidential effort, seeing this early-primary state as a more natural fit—culturally, ideologically, geographically—than either Iowa or New Hampshire. He has acted accordingly in the years since—snatching up the state's top talent for his political operation, cultivating personal relationships with influential people on the ground, and making repeated trips to keep tabs on his burgeoning circuit of supporters in the state.
For those who think Jeb inevitable, read this story.