Good morning everyone! Yet again I wake up to another case of open mouth, insert foot from the HRC camp. I am having so much fun reading the #HillarySoQualified feed that my cheeks hurt from smiling. Such a wonderful problem to have.

Here's your daily Letters to the Editor, shiny graphics courtesy of LoneStarMike, Facebook stats and articles from the comments section of the Bernie News Roundup over at GOS. Please remember to tip and rec over there if you can possible stand it.

Enjoy!

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Posted by LoneStarMike

Current Facebook stats as of 5:05 a.m. CST

Bernie2016/Hillary2016/Senator Bernie Sanders

Bernie Sanders 3,802,827 Presidential Campaign Page

Hillary Clinton 3,124,382 Presidential Campaign Page

Bernie Sanders 3,705,217 U. S. Senatorial Page

Tuesday, Bernie had 668,746 more likes than Sec. Clinton

Today, Bernie has 678,445 more likes than Sec. Clinton

(The gap widens and it’s the highest it’s ever been)

By the way,in case any of you ever want to go back and look for a specific LTE, here’s a good link. I didn’t realize that of yesterday, there were 680 of them.

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Bernie’s New Campaign Jet ;^)

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Dem primary still a race

The Boston Herald LTE — Boston, Massachusetts

Primary voting in Wisconsin once again shows that Bernie Sanders is the overwhelming favorite of voters under 40 (“Sanders’ surge continues with victory in Wisconsin,” April 6). And it’s not just Democrats, but people attracted?by his common-sense approaches to challenges faced by most people — approaches that work in most developed countries. That is why he gets crowds of so many thousands of enthusiastic people.

Those crowds are why the media shouldn’t sell Sanders’ chances short. Hillary Clinton just is not generating the enthusiasm that he is. And a high percentage of voters view her unfavorably — numbers that only look good when compared to Donald Trump’s.

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Marriage Equality Graphic

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Writer uninformed about socialism

Whidbey New-Times LTE — Coupeville, Washington

Rick Kiser’s April 2 letter to the Whidbey News-Times makes false statements about Bernie Sanders and his supporters by linking his “democratic socialism” to the fascism of Adolf Hitler’s WWII era German Nazism and the current totalitarian communist regime of Kim Jun Un in North Korea.

Kiser is obviously not able to distinguish between Nazi fascism, totalitarian communism and democratic socialism based on European and Scandinavian models of social democratic economic systems.

That he just lumps these three ideologies all into one system, mistakenly calls them “socialist” and make no distinctions as to their differences is mind boggling.

To put German National Socialism, Nazism, on a list of historical socialist parties tells me that he doesn’t have a clue as to what he is talking about.

Hitler chose the misleading name of National Socialism for his party to attract disaffected German workers. It was a fascist not a socialist movement.

Does Kiser think communist North Korea is a democratic society because it is named the Peoples Democratic Republic of North Korea? He needs to turn off Fox News and do his own research. Where does this reckless, intense hatred of European and Scandinavian social democracy come from with his comparison of it to Hitler’s Germany and North Korea?

Our European and Scandinavian friends and allies are democratic countries and have a very successful mixture of capitalist market economies and socialist-inspired programs like universal college education, healthcare for all, subsidized housing, maternity leave, decent living wages and old age care, similar in fact to our very successful FDR-inspired socialist programs of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

That Kiser would associate this “democratic socialist” Jewish man with the Nazi regime, the most murderous, anti-Semitic movement in history, is just not appropriate at all.

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Bernie’s Other New Campaign Jet ;^)

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'Warped idea of social economics'

The Courier Journal LTE — Louisville, Kentucky

We have a warped idea of social economics in this country. We think economic plans are either one thing or another. In reality, every society in the history of man has been a carefully graded mixture of free enterprise, socialism and communism. The one thing that many societies lacked and found they could do very well do without was corporate capitalism, which is not the same thing at all as free enterprise.

In our country, the postal service and fire departments are among many institutions dating from the foundation of the republic that are socialist in nature and set up by the likes of Benjamin Franklin. Our armed forces are set up on a communist model established by Baron von Steuben and George Washington during the Revolutionary War. The Shakers were and are religious communists as are the monks at Gethsemane and the nuns at Nazareth. We put our emphasis on free enterprise.

Here's our real problem: More and more, free enterprise is being hijacked and suppressed by corporate capitalism. How many small business people are daily put out of business by the international megacorporations, most only nominally American, which constantly undercut their business? Until this reality is effectively addressed, wealth will continue to accumulate in the hands of the few and the needs of the many will go unanswered.

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Sanders dropping out is presumptuous

The Daily Herald LTE — Wheaton, Illinois

Bernie In reference to Connie Schultz's column "Oh, Susan, what have you done?" printed in the Daily Herald April 3.

Excuse me? Relatives wearing out their welcome? Susan, Susan, Susan? Keep on driving right off the cliff? It is beyond presumptuous to suggest that Bernie Sanders just wrap up his campaign and dutifully turn over his voters to the Democratic Party. Not only are many primaries currently contested and many others yet to be held, votes of Bernie supporters are not the candidate's to give away.

In our view, Bernie is the current leader of the American Spring, a movement that will outlast this election season, whatever the outcome. Susan Sarandon along with a growing subset of Sanders supporters, call them the Berniecrats, have every right to vote the way they choose and many will not simply switch their votes to the status quo mainstream candidate.

Bernie, against all expectation, has created momentum which is still growing, because he speaks to and acts on issues that matter to real people. Bernie on the ballot will give voters a real choice come November.

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Posted by Don midwest

Bernie stand on Israel/Palestine — earthshaking & official US policy

For almost 15 years the first thing I read in the morning is Juan Cole’s blog. He is the Univ of MI middle east historian who rather than being an obscure academic of the middle east and its religions, has become a world figure of commentary on the middle east.

His blog has expanded so he now posts articles from others as well.

Today he points out that what Bernie said fits with US policy, but it has never been said by a US president. This is very important because the support of the Zionists in Israel is supporting an illegal occupation. As you probably know, Hillary is all in for the Zionists saying things like having Bibi for an official visit the first month after being sworn in.

Are Sanders’ Criticisms of Israeli Occupation Policies unprecedented in a Presidential Campaign?

Bernie Sanders is being attacked for comments on the Middle East in his interview with the editorial board of The New York Daily News, but all he did was restate current US government policy.

What is remarkable is that Sanders dared just, like, criticize Israeli policy toward the Palestinians as involving illegal squatter settlements and disproportionate use of force. Everyone knows these things, but I can’t recall another presidential candidate who said them outright during a campaign. This is because although they are a small minority, Jewish Americans form a swing vote in some key states like Florida, and they are unusually generous in donating to political campaigns. And politicians assume that Jewish Americans are looking for unvarnished praise of Israel. But while arch-conservative pro-Israel lobbies like AIPAC may never want to hear a discouraging word, Jewish Americans (most of them political liberals and leftists) are deeply divided on the far-right Likud government of PM Binyamin Netanyahu, and Sen. Sanders is well aware of this. Besides, his crowd-sourced funding model means he does not need the donations of billionaire American Likudniks.

You have to wonder whether Sanders is not making a historic breakthrough in American discourse on Israeli policy. It is just a few inches to the left, but it is unprecedented in a mainstream presidential campaign (and he still had to recite the mantra of Israel’s right to exist and point out that he has family there– as if those were relevant to the main issue of Occupation).

BB = Bold Bernie

“No issues, no politics” — Bernie has changed the Overton window by clearly laying out issues, the very issues the oligarchy and the media hide.

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In response to a comment by Zeitgeistus with this link:

GE CEO Jeff Immelt Takes on Bernie Sanders

“easier to imagine end of earth than end of capitalism” comment by Frederic Jameson

Well, well, the corporations are being shamed for being immoral

CEO’s have been heroes for the last couple of decades and now Bad Bernie is attacking them and their billionaire friends. Shame on them.

The article you link is a daily take on business in the magazine Fortune. The last paragraph notes that his column has been criticized because it spends too much time on politics but the Fortune journalists notes that politics is where the action is these days.

As long as politicians could pass benefits to the corporations and the oligarchs, it was best to keep politics hidden in the media of personalities and technology and experiences.

Bernie has brought issues to the surface which has attacked the depoliticized culture — and it deserved this attack.

The short column in Fortune has a link to a study of how the corporations are realizing that they have a problem and are responding, at least in words.

(Off topic to this but related: the Thomas Frank excerpt from his recent book “Listen Liberals” describes how the Clinton Foundation provides a platform for oligarchs to be in favor of something that no one is against, namely micro loans for woman in the third world, and in so doing helps them appear moral, while letting them off the hook for what happens in the US and how they corrupt the earth)

Back to the report on how corporations will respond

Tackling Economic Inequality, Boosting Opportunity: A Blueprint for Business

Capitalism has underpinned the most prosperous nation known to man. But today, acute economic inequality threatens our system’s cohesion, capacity, and viability. Much of this inequality derives from lagging real income growth for the majority of hard-working people, placing the American Dream increasingly out of reach as a result. The issue concerns a broad swath of citizens – from low-income to high-income, living in red states and blue states. Yet there is no agreement, indeed intense controversy, over causes and solutions.

The recommendations outlined in this report reflect a consensus achieved through respectful dialogue among CED Members, who began from diverse perspectives reflecting every corner of the business community. All suggested reforms – spanning health care to taxation to higher education – stem from our belief that the greatest potential to lessen inequality comes through creating equality of opportunity. We provide a framework for driving long- and short-term change in the private sector and at every level of government.

For too long Capitalism has been given a free ride. It will take a political revolution outside of capitalism to restore it to its rightful place.

“easier to imagine end of earth than end of capitalism” comment by Frederic Jameson

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Obama’s gift to Donald Trump — cracking down on journalists

OBAMA’S GIFT TO DONALD TRUMP: A POLICY OF CRACKING DOWN ON JOURNALISTS AND THEIR SOURCES

Over 2 years ago a Columbia University law professor gave a series of lectures entitled “Snowden and the Future.” It was an incredible work that focused on information and surveillance linked to the history of Roman Empire. I watched the final live broadcast when he made a few remarks off the script which are not on the video. He said when he began this effort he thought that it would just be a lecture at Columbia and didn’t expect the strong positive reaction. This was back in the days that many were still going after Snowden and Obama was held in high regard by far too many because we didn’t know how, like the Clintons, he had shifted the country away from democracy.

EBEN MOGLEN Snowden and the Future

Now for the article from the intercept on Obama’s policies helping Trump and other future totalitarian leaders in the US

Two years ago, Eben Moglen, a law professor at Columbia University, gave a series of lectures in which he discussed the idea of “fastening the procedures of totalitarianism on the substance of democratic society.” Moglen’s lectures were mostly concerned with surveillance by the National Security Agency — the title of his talks was “Snowden and the Future” — but his idea applies to other procedures the U.S. government has recently become fond of. Few are more important than targeting whistleblowers and journalists, and Obama has begun the fastening process.

The article begins with

ONE OF THE intellectual gargoyles that has crawled out of Donald Trump’s brain is the idea that we should “open up” libel laws to make it easier to punish the media for negative or unfair stories. Trump also wants top officials to sign nondisclosure agreements, so they never write memoirs that upset the boss. Trump is so disdainful of free speech that he has even vowed to use the Espionage Act to imprison anyone who says or leaks anything to the media that displeases him.

Actually, that last bit is made up; Trump hasn’t talked about the Espionage Act. Instead, the Obama administration has used the draconian 1917 law to prosecute more leakers and whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined. Under the cover of the Espionage Act and other laws, the administration has secretly obtained the emails and phone records of various reporters, and declared one of them — James Rosen of Fox News — a potential “co-conspirator” with his government source. Another reporter, James Risen of the New York Times, faced a jail sentence unless he revealed a government source (which he refused to do).

Obama has warned of the imminent perils of a Trump presidency, but on the key issue of freedom of the press, which is intimately tied to the ability of officials to talk to journalists, his own administration has established a dangerous precedent for Trump — or any future occupant of the Oval Office — to use one of the most punitive laws of the land against some of the most courageous and necessary people we have. One section of the Espionage Act even allows for the death penalty.

Obama was lambasted for his lies about celebrating excellence journalism — contradiction comes too easy to oligarchs. And here is his indirect give to Trump

Obama’s gift to Trump was unintentionally highlighted in a speech the president delivered last week at a ceremony to honor the winner of the Toner Prize for Excellence in Journalism. Obama lamented the financial challenges facing the journalism industry and lauded the assembled reporters and editors for the hard and vital work they do. He made no mention of the ways in which his administration is making that job even harder, however, and that omission prompted the winner of the prize,ProPublica’s Alec MacGillis, to gently note, “That does not get him off the hook for his administration taking so long to respond to our FOIAs.”

The next paragraph is the one put first, the reference to Eben Moglen which jumped out to me.

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Great diary — Sanders is no democrat

The heart of the democratic party is at stake in this election, and even more important the heart of the nation and of mother earth.

Here is the diary

I agree with Hillary Clinton — Sanders is no Democrat

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Should lobbyists be super delegates?

Some Democratic Lawmakers Are Open to Removing Lobbyists as Superdelegates

DEMOCRATIC LAWMAKERS HAVE declared that they will work to get money out of politics, but only a few are interested in getting rid of a Democratic Party system that allows corporate lobbyists to select the party’s presidential nominee, potentially thwarting the will of voters.

Democratic National Committee rules allow for 712 so-called superdelegates to vote at the nominating convention, alongside the 4,053 pledged delegates who are selected directly by primary voters and caucus goers.

Most of the 712 superdelegates, who are not bound to the decisions of voters, are elected Democratic politicians. But a significant number are individuals in the private sector. As we reported previously, several superdelegates are former politicians and party insiders who now work as lobbyists for banks, oil companies, foreign governments, and payday lenders, among other special interests.

We recently asked a number of congressional Democrats about lobbyist superdelegates and received a mixed reaction.

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Hillary Clinton Fundraiser Hosted by All-Star Cast of Financial Regulators Who Joined Wall Street

Quite a cast of characters hanging around Hillary

Have you heard that she is so pure that she cannot be bought off?

Socrates: First, shouldn't we explain how a democracy becomes an oligarchy?

Adeimantus: Yes.

Socrates: The crutical step is that the rich figure out how to manipulate politics so the laws benefit them instead of the public.

Adeimantus: So it seems.

Plato, Republic, 550d

Translated by the author of the outstanding book, Keith Quincy

His book is “Worse than You Think: The Real Economy Hidden Beneath Washington’s Rigged Statistics, And Where To Go From Here”

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Naomi Klein — Clinton unsuited to tackle climate change

The Problem With Hillary Clinton Isn’t Just Her Corporate Cash. It’s Her Corporate Worldview. Clinton is uniquely unsuited to the epic task of confronting the fossil-fuel companies that profit from climate change.