Welcome to the Bernie News Roundup. The BNR is a voluntary, non-campaign associated roundup of news, media, & other information related to Bernie Sanders run for President. Visit the group page to join or find past editions.
Our New Site, Updated Through The Day!
Sign Up, Donate, Volunteer @ Bernie's official page.
More information about Bernie & The Issues @ feelthebern.org
Sanders Dings Haley On Medicaid:
As he campaigns through South Carolina, Sen. Bernie Sanders is taking more than a few shots at Gov. Nikki Haley and the state’s conservative legislators on health care.
In multiple speeches here, the liberal Democratic presidential candidate and Independent senator from Vermont has a one-two punch ready: South Carolina should have expanded Medicaid and the decision not to was fueled, at least in part, because President Barack Obama wants that to happen.
“Your governor, your legislature, as well as many many other governors and legislatures in Republican states, put ideology, a rich right-wing ideology, in front of and before the needs of their people,” Sanders told an estimated 500 audience members at the Sumter County Civic Center on Saturday.
“Right here in South Carolina, over 200,000 people would gain health insurance —200,000 people!— if the governor and the legislature would approve the expansion of Medicaid.”
Sanders added that South Carolina would create “tens of thousands” of decent-paying jobs.
“I would appeal to the governor and your legislature: overcome your dislike of President Obama — you dislike him, that’s fine, but don’t punish the people of the state,” Sanders continued.
Sanders made a similar attack a day earlier. Each time, he didn’t mention Haley by name but instead referred to South Carolina’s current governor. It’s a particularly conspicuous jab since Haley has been mentioned as a possible Republican vice presidential candidate, with Medicaid a hot topic on both sides of the campaign trail.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/...
Nearly 10,000 Have Showed Up For Sanders In South Carolina:
Bernie Sanders showed the power of a liberal message in a red state by drawing 9,200 supporters during a two-day campaign swing through South Carolina.
According to the Sanders campaign, the Democratic candidate drew his biggest crowd of the weekend (3,100) in Charleston, SC. Sanders also drew big crowds in Greenville (2,800), Columbia (2,700) and Sumter, South Carolina (600).
In Charleston, Sanders discussed the need for racial justice reforms, “Racism still remains a much too real part of American society. No one can deny it.”
He also discussed the Charleston church shooting in June, and “the sickness of a man who can walk into a Bible study class in Charleston and then take out a gun and kill nine people. As president of the United States, nobody will fight harder to end institutional racism and to reform our broken criminal justice system.”
Bernie Sanders continues to demonstrate that a). There are liberals in the South, and b). They will turn out to see a liberal candidate talk about the issues. There is a large and growing audience for the populism that Bernie Sanders is spreading.
Sanders Confronts His 'Black Voters Problem':
We don’t know him.”
Carol Singletary got that response time and again in 2008 when she tried to sell her friends, family and other African Americans in her native South Carolina on underdog presidential candidate Barack Obama, who was competing with a seemingly invincible Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Now she is hearing the same about another Clinton challenger she backs: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who visited South Carolina this weekend as he continued to surge among die-hard liberals and frustrated progressives — and struggle to connect with black voters.
Back in 2008, black voters in South Carolina, site of the first primary in a state with a significant African American population, eventually got behind Obama, abandoned the Clinton campaign and became a key bloc to help the then-senator win the Democratic nomination.
Singletary, who went on to help organize for Obama in Georgia, Pennsylvania and North Carolina in both 2008 and 2012, thinks South Carolina could do the same for Sanders — help put his long-shot campaign on the map and once again disprove the handicappers who say Clinton has a lock on the black vote.
LoL, FOX has this headline:
Bernie Sanders takes aim at 'greedy' Koch brothers
Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders is making the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch the face of a "corrupted" political and economic system that the Vermont senator wants to upend.
Sanders delighted a South Carolina rally of more than 3,000 people Saturday with his assertions that the Kochs and other "greedy" billionaires are destroying American democracy by infusing huge sums of cash into campaigns and election.
The Vermont senator, who is pushing former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton from the left, called for publicly financed elections that would allow "anyone" to seek public office without "begging from billionaires."
And he pledged that his nominees to the Supreme Court would have to promise themselves that they would try to overturn the Citizens United decision that allows corporations, unions and wealthy individuals to spend unlimited sums in campaigns.
"We live in a nation in which a handful of very, very wealthy people have extraordinary power over our economy and our political life and the media," Sanders told the boisterous crowd at a convention center near Charleston.
"They are very, very powerful and many of them are extremely greedy," he continued. "For the life of me, I will never understand how a family like the Koch brothers, worth $85 billion, apparently think that's not enough money."
Sanders' remarks came on the same day that Americans for Prosperity, a conservative activists organization backed heavily by the Kochs, heard from several Republican White House hopefuls.
Charleston News:
More than 3,000 people came together in South Carolina for Bernie Sander's campaign rally at the Convention center. This is Sander's fourth stop in South Carolina.
Sanders is a self proclaimed democratic socialist who says there's a need for a political revolution.
"This great country of ours, our government belongs to all of us not just a handful of billionaires," says Sanders.
People came from out of state to attend the rally.
"It's very big, some people have driven over 2 hours to be here," says local resident John Therres.
Sanders focused on topics like making college more accessible, pay equality for women and increasing minimum wage.
"We need to move toward a national living wage of 15 bucks an hour over the next few years," says Sanders.
He also talked about the importance of the Voting Rights Act and racial justice.
Many people who attended say one of the things that sets Sanders apart is that fact that he's relatable.
"He seems to be like he's more for the people and doing things for the people, healthcare which is huge everybody should have healthcare," says a local resident Kathy Perkins.
Sanders - A Man On Fire:
There was a man with a “Stop Puppy Mills” T-shirt and another whose shirt read “National Sarcasm Society.” There was a woman, dressed entirely in white, holding a banner reading “Lead Us to Clean Energy.” There was a man with an Apache haircut. There was even a little old lady in tennis shoes.
This could only be a Bernie Sanders rally.
And the lady in tennis shoes? She was here mainly out of curiosity. She voted for Mitt Romney in the last two New Hampshire primaries.
Then there was the candidate himself. He wore a dress shirt, open at the neck, and his speech started early and ended late. He used the word “billionaire” more than half a dozen times, and he sprinkled his talk with references to “Corporate America.” He spoke about big campaign contributions (he has none, wouldn’t take any) and the “grotesque level of income and wealth inequality in America” (he deplored it) and won his biggest applause when he said, “This is a rigged economy, an economy that is not sustainable, and that is not an American economy.”
But he wasn’t done yet. In the sweltering confines of the Exeter Town Hall — every seat filled, the back of the hall five deep with standees, the balcony jammed and every one of the seven granite steps outside occupied with the devout, the devoted and the determined, all drenched in heavy perspiration — he launched into his speech: full employment, the Citizens United decision, gay marriage, voter suppression, the Trans Pacific Partnership, student debt, climate change, acidification of the oceans, access to abortion, energy efficiency, the criminal justice system, prison reform, mental health and crumbling infrastructure. In one sentence he crammed in the words “racism,” “sexism” and “homophobia.”
On Mass Incarceration:
Mass incarceration is an issue whose time has finally come. There are many signs that the wind is shifting on the question of America’s vast, wasteful and immensely destructive prison state, both among the public and the political class — and that shift is not limited to the left. Criminal justice reform was supposed to be the issue that separated Rand Paul from the other Republican presidential candidates, at least until he got Trumped. It has become a central focus, believe it or not, of the Charles Koch Institute, the billionaire GOP donor’s libertarian nonprofit. This shift has created an important opening for political change, but it’s also a shift in the moral and cultural landscape, in ways that may be less evident but are just as important.
Barack Obama has evidently decided to use the bully pulpit of his final two years in the White House to shift the national debate on mass incarceration and the enormous racial disparities it both reveals and exacerbates. This could be seen as six years late and billions of dollars short, given the extent to which the president has avoided or soft-pedaled those issues throughout his time in office. As in so many other areas, Obama is more reactive than proactive, more a follower than a leader. He’s responding to the same conditions that have compelled Hillary Clinton to take up the cause despite what can only be described as an abysmal record on these issues, the same conditions that have unexpectedly made prisons, policing and criminal justice central themes of the 2016 campaign.
In fairness, Bernie Sanders has been a critic of America’s mass incarceration policies for years, although he has foregrounded the issue much more vigorously since being confronted by Black Lives Matter protesters. As is generally the case with any such shift, these politicians have been forced into new stances by ground-level activism, by the sheer weight of statistical evidence and intellectual argument, and by the altered mood of the public.
Nate Silver & Co. On How Sanders Could Win:
We’ve been pretty tough on Bernie Sanders here at FiveThirtyEight. He’s surged in the polling and drawn big, enthusiastic crowds, and yet we’ve written several articles largely dismissing his odds of toppling Hillary Clinton. Many Sanders fans have written us calm, kind notes arguing that Sanders has a chance. Not a “well, anything is possible” chance — a real chance to win the Democratic presidential nomination. So, today’s question: How can Bernie Sanders win? [This is an edited transcript of a conversation in Slack.]
natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): I still think it needs to involve some “shock” (as an economist would define that term) to the Clinton campaign. Meaning, some substantially worse turn in the email scandal than what’s been reported so far. Hackers publish a bunch of top-secret documents culled from Clinton’s emails, for instance. Or a new scandal. Or a health problem.
In that event, Democratic elites would probably turn toward another establishment candidate. Most likely Joe Biden. But while I’m pretty sure that Sanders can’t beat Clinton head-to-head — he’s losing to her badly now, after all — I’m not so sure that’s true of Biden, etc.