Tag Archives: sanders

No, Hillary Clinton Isn’t Being Attacked for Being "Not Qualified"

by AidenBenes01 Posted on May 31, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Over the weekend, Janell Ross interviewed a couple of experts in gender and politics to get their take on whether Hillary Clinton is held to a different standard than male candidates. Julie Dolan, a professor of political science at Macalester College in Minnesota, had this to say:

Clinton is the most experienced candidate in the field, but campaign rivals Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are leveling attacks against her that she’s not qualified for the job. In doing so, they’re playing into a long-standing narrative that women lack what it takes to succeed in the male-dominated world of politics. The fact that two less-experienced male candidates are leveling this attack against her is telling. Neither Trump nor Sanders feels compelled to shore up their own credentials or justify their own relative lack of experience because they don’t need to; they benefit from a gendered double standard where men are automatically presumed qualified for public office and women are not.

This illustrates the problem of viewing politics through too narrow a lens. For starters, Hillary Clinton isn’t the most experienced candidate in the field. Bernie Sanders has served in Congress since 1991. That’s more experience than Hillary even if you count her years as First Lady. And while Trump has no political experience, he’s running on his business background—just as lots of other candidates have. This year alone Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson joined Trump in the Republican primary as candidates with no political experience at all.

Nor is it true that Hillary’s opponents have been slamming her for being unqualified—aside from the usual sense in which political candidates always claim to be better qualified than their opponents. There was a single incident in April where Hillary tiptoed a bit around the question of whether Bernie was qualified, which led to a misleading Washington Post headline (“Clinton questions whether Sanders is qualified to be president”), which in turn led to Bernie losing his temper and kinda sorta saying she’s not qualified if she’s taking lots of money from Wall Street. But even there, Bernie was pretty obviously using “unqualified” in the sense of “bad policies,” not in the sense of having too little experience.

As for Trump, again, there was a single incident a couple of weeks ago in which Hillary called him unqualified, and he naturally hit back in his usual nanner-nanner way: calling her judgment bad and saying she’s the one not qualified to be president. Just the usual Trump bluster.

Hillary Clinton simply isn’t the target of an unusual number of attacks on her experience and qualification. She’s rather famously running on the fact that she has more of those qualities than anyone else in the race, and no one has really disputed that. Quite the contrary: this year, having a lot of experience is something of a problem, one that both Sanders and Trump have capitalized on. If Hillary Clinton is being slammed for anything, it’s for being too qualified, not the opposite.

Source:

No, Hillary Clinton Isn’t Being Attacked for Being "Not Qualified"

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on No, Hillary Clinton Isn’t Being Attacked for Being "Not Qualified"

Bernie Sanders is Going to Town on the Democratic Convention. That’s Fine.

by FredManifold32 Posted on May 29, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Over at the Washington Monthly, D.R. Tucker is pretty fed up with Bernie Sanders. He agrees with me that Sanders seems too bitter these days, and he also thinks that Bernie should dial back the attacks on Hillary now that she’s the almost certain winner of the primary. But he also says this:

As the old joke goes, even Stevie Wonder can see that Sanders is going to have an epic meltdown at the convention if superdelegates reject his request for the nomination. The behavior of Sanders, his campaign staff, and some of his supporters is profoundly disappointing to those who wanted Sanders to play a constructive and healthy role in defining the post-Obama Democratic Party. During the 2008 Democratic primary, Clinton may have said a few undiplomatic words about Obama in the final days of her campaign, but it never seemed as though Clinton personally loathed the future president. Things are much different this time around.

….Clinton and the Democratic Party should be quite concerned about the prospect of a disastrous convention, disrupted by Sanders supporters upset over their hero not getting what they believe he was entitled to.

I don’t believe this for a second. Take a look at what Bernie has been doing lately. He’s demanded more representation on the platform committee. He’s objected to a couple of committee chairs. He’s remarked that he hopes Hillary chooses a vice president who’s not in thrall to Wall Street.

This is exactly what Sanders should be doing. Teeing off on Hillary is a bad idea for Sanders, for the Democratic Party, and—given who the Republican nominee is—bad for the country and the world. Sanders may, as Tucker says, loathe Clinton, but he needs to put that aside.

But there’s no reason for him to put aside the enormous leverage he possesses to move the party in a more progressive direction. He won a lot of votes. He has a lot of delegates. He has a substantial following that’s willing to take cues from him. There’s no intelligent politician in the country who wouldn’t use that to push the country in a direction he deeply believes in. Hillary would do the same thing in his position.

So go ahead Bernie: press for a more progressive platform. Press for a progressive vice president. Press for primary rule changes that you think would give progressive candidates a better shot at winning. Press for the policies you believe in, and don’t hold back. In the end, the threat of Donald Trump will prevent Bernie and his followers from hating Hillary too long, but in the meantime there’s no reason not to use every weapon in his arsenal to browbeat both Hillary and the Democratic Party into moving in the direction he wants them to go.

Just keep the personal attacks, both real and implied, out of the picture. They do you no good.

View original article:  

Bernie Sanders is Going to Town on the Democratic Convention. That’s Fine.

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Bernie Sanders is Going to Town on the Democratic Convention. That’s Fine.

Today’s Dose of Liberal Heresy: Campaign Finance Reform Isn’t That Big a Deal

by CindyParkhill Posted on May 28, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

I was musing the other day about something or other, and for some reason it occurred to me that there are several subjects near and dear to progressive hearts that I flatly disagree with. I’m not talking about, say, charter schools, where there’s a robust, ongoing intra-liberal debate and both sides already have plenty of adherents. Nor am I talking about things like Wall Street regulation, where everyone (including me) thinks we need to do more but we disagree on technical issues (Bernie wants to break up big banks, I want to double capital requirements).

I’m thinking instead of things that seem to enjoy something like 90+ percent liberal support—and which I think are basically a waste of liberal time and energy. So if I write about them, a whole lot of people are going to be pissed off. Something like 90+ percent of my readership, I’d guess. Who needs the grief? After all, for the most part there’s usually not much harm in spending time and energy on these things (though there are exceptions).

But let’s give it a go anyway. Maybe this will be the first entry in a periodic series. Maybe I’ll discover that I’m not quite as alone on these issues as I think. Here’s my first entry.

Campaign Finance Reform

Liberals love campaign finance reform. Citizens United is our Roe v. Wade, and it’s become an even more central issue since Bernie Sanders began his presidential run last year. As near as I can tell, Bernie—along with most liberals—thinks it’s the key foundational issue of modern progressivism. Until we seriously reduce the amount of money in political campaigns, no real progressive reform is possible.

I’m pretty sure this is completely wrong. Here are seven reasons that have persuaded me of this over the years, with the most important reason left to the end:

  1. Half a century has produced nothing. Liberals groups have been putting serious effort into campaign finance reform for about 40 years now. The only result has been abject failure. Ban union donations, they create PACs. Ban hard money, you get soft money. Ban soft money, you get Super PACs. Etc. None of the reforms have worked, and even before Citizens United the Supreme Court had steadily made effective reform efforts harder and harder. What’s even worse, the public still isn’t with us. If you ask them vaguely if they think there’s too much money in politics, most will say yes. If you ask them if they really care, they shrug. After nearly half a century, maybe it’s time to ask why.
  2. Other countries spend less. Most other rich countries spend a lot less on political campaigns than we do. Are they less in thrall to moneyed interests because of this? Some are, some aren’t. I’ve never seen any convincing evidence that there’s much of a correlation.
  3. Billionaires are idiots. Seriously. The evidence of the last decade or so suggests that billionaires just aren’t very effective at using their riches to win elections. This is unsurprising: billionaires are egotists who tend to think that because they got rich doing X, they are also geniuses at Y and Z and on beyond zebra. But they aren’t. This stuff is a hobby for them, and mostly they’re just wasting their money.
  4. The small-dollar revolution. Starting with Howard Dean in 2004, the internet has produced an explosion of small-dollar donations, accounting for over a third of presidential fundraising in 2012 and 2016. This year, for example, Hillary Clinton has so far raised $288 million (including money raised by outside groups). Bernie Sanders has raised $208 million, all of it in small-dollar donations averaging $27. Ironically, at the same time that he’s made campaign finance reform a major issue, Bernie has demonstrated that small dollars can power a serious insurgency.
  5. Money really is speech. Obviously this is an opinion, and a really rare one on my side of the political spectrum. But why should political speech be restricted? My read of the First Amendment suggests that if there’s any single kind of speech that should enjoy the highest level of protection, it’s political speech.
  6. We may have maxed out anyway. There’s increasing evidence that in big-time contests (governors + national offices), we’ve basically reached the point of diminishing returns. At this point, if billionaires spend more money it just won’t do much good even if they’re smart about it. There are only so many minutes of TV time available and only so many persuadable voters. More important, voters have only so much bandwidth. Eventually they tune out, and it’s likely that we’ve now reached that point.

    In the interests of fairness, I’ll acknowledge that I might be wrong about this. It might turn out that there are clever ways to spend even more; billionaires might get smarter; and Citizens United has only just begun to affect spending. Maybe in a couple of decades I’ll be eating my words about this.

  7. Campaign spending hasn’t gone up much anyway. I told you I’d leave the most important reason for the end, and this is it. It’s easy to be shocked when you hear about skyrocketing billions of dollars being spent on political campaigns, but billions of dollars aren’t that much in a country the size of the United States. In 2012, Obama spent $1.1 billion vs. Mitt Romney’s $1.2 billion. That’s about 1 percent of total ad spending in the US. Hell, in the cell phone biz alone, AT&T spent $1.3 billion vs. Verizon’s $1.2 billion. If you want to look at campaign spending, you really need to size it to the growth in GDP over the past half century or so.

So here it is. These two charts show our skyrocketing spending on presidential campaigns as a percent of GDP. Data for the chart on the left comes from Mother Jones. The chart on the right comes from the Center for Responsive Politics. Total presidential spending is up about 18 percent since 2000. I supposed I’d like to see this reduced as much as the next guy, but it’s hard to see it as the core corrupter of American politics. It’s a symptom, but it’s really not the underlying disease. There really are problems with the influence of the rich on American politics, but campaigns are probably the place where it matters least, not most.

Read the article – 

Today’s Dose of Liberal Heresy: Campaign Finance Reform Isn’t That Big a Deal

Posted in alo, Citizen, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Today’s Dose of Liberal Heresy: Campaign Finance Reform Isn’t That Big a Deal

Even Sanders’ plan to curb fossil fuel production isn’t ambitious enough

by DeenaBumg Posted on May 4, 2016

Even Sanders’ plan to curb fossil fuel production isn’t ambitious enough

By on May 4, 2016Share

About 25 percent of all fossil fuels extracted in the United States come from federal lands. That’s a whole lot of coal, oil, and gas that presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are talking about when they debate ending fossil fuel production on public lands.

In a new report, the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) forecasts the kinds of cuts in fossil fuel production the country would need to make to be consistent with a 2 degrees Celsius warming scenario:

Stockholm Environment Institute

The first thing that’s clear from this chart is ending fossil fuel development on federal lands still isn’t enough to stop climate change at 2 degrees. Even the dream scenario, in which we stop drilling and mining on all public lands tomorrow, doesn’t cut it.

And nobody’s even really proposing the dream scenario. Sanders’ proposed Keep It in the Ground Act to ban fossil fuel development on public lands only ends new federal leases — the blue chunk in the chart above. It says nothing about the land already leased and under production.

Even with the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan in place, SEI expects fossil fuel production to rise by 11 percent by 2040 — unless we get serious about passing new climate legislation. To line up with a 2-degree goal, the country would need to slice its production by 40–60 percent.

Getting to 2 degrees doesn’t just depend on what the president can do; it requires the entire U.S. economy to shift toward clean energy — along with the rest of the world.

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

Get Grist in your inbox

Credit:  

Even Sanders’ plan to curb fossil fuel production isn’t ambitious enough

Posted in alo, Amana, Anchor, FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Even Sanders’ plan to curb fossil fuel production isn’t ambitious enough

This Is Why Hillary Clinton Can’t Tell Bernie Sanders to Drop Out

by LinEagarwvz Posted on May 2, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Hillary Clinton’s lead in delegates over rival Bernie Sanders is now almost insurmountable as they move toward the conclusion of the Democratic presidential primary contest. But Clinton has not called on him to drop out of the race, for one simple reason: the example her own campaign set in 2008.

Eight years ago this month, Clinton was trailing hopelessly behind then-Sen. Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination. On May 1, 2008, Clinton loaned her bankrupt campaign $1 million (following at least $10 million in earlier loans). Before the end of that week, pundits were calling the contest for Obama, whose May 6 win in the North Carolina primary, by 14 points, had made his delegate lead essentially insurmountable. “We now know who the Democratic nominee will be,” Tim Russert said on MSNBC after the results came in. Less than a week later, Obama surpassed Clinton in the super-delegate count, signaling that the party establishment was shifting behind the presumptive nominee.

But Clinton was determined to fight until the last votes had been cast. She would go on to win contests in West Virginia, Kentucky, and South Dakota before the primary ended on June 3, even though there was no way for her to make up her deficit in the delegate count.

Along the way, the Clinton campaign put forward every conceivable argument to justify staying in the race. It used wins in states like Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Kentucky to claim that Obama was losing support among white working-class voters and that she would be the stronger general election candidate. On May 5, it began to argue about the delegate math, making the case that the number of delegates needed to clinch the nomination was actually 2,209, not 2,025, the figure that had been cited up until then—and that if neither campaign reached that new number, Clinton was prepared for a floor fight at the party’s convention. On May 23, Clinton justified her continued White House bid by noting that in 1968, Democratic presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June, after winning the California primary. And lurking in the background in these final weeks was the rumor that Republican operatives had gotten hold of a tape of Michelle Obama disparaging “whitey.”

Eight years later, Clinton knows she cannot turn around and tell Sanders it’s time to leave the race, even though her current lead over Sanders, at about 300 delegates, is larger than the nearly 160-delegate lead Obama had over her after the North Carolina primary in 2008. The Sanders campaign had $17 million on hand as of the latest public filings at the end of March, giving it far more fighting power than the broke Clinton effort had at the same point in 2008.

So the Clinton team has been careful not to say Sanders should drop out. After her victory in New York, Clinton’s communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, told reporters that the campaign expected Clinton to be the nominee but that Sanders had a right to continue to fight. Instead of focusing on Clinton’s refusal to bow out in 2008, her campaign is talking up her unequivocal support of Obama after the primary was over—suggesting that that is the example Sanders should follow. In late May 2008, she said she and Obama “do see eye-to-eye when it comes to uniting our party to elect a Democratic president in the fall.” And when she announced her withdrawal from the race on June 7, she forcefully threw her support behind Obama and urged her fans to do the same.

“I think she set a gold standard for how people who don’t end up with the nomination, who lose in that effort, should come together and help the party,” Palmieri said on the night of the New York primary last month.

What Clinton isn’t mentioning is that before she tried to unify the party, she was questioning Obama’s appeal to white voters, hoping that a bombshell video would surface and help take down her rival, and entertaining a convention floor fight. Despite her team’s claims of magnanimity, at this point eight years ago, Clinton was five weeks and a few attacks shy of giving into the inevitable and uniting the party.

Originally posted here: 

This Is Why Hillary Clinton Can’t Tell Bernie Sanders to Drop Out

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Is Why Hillary Clinton Can’t Tell Bernie Sanders to Drop Out

Why We’re Tough on The Candidates You Like

by PorterTeeple273 Posted on April 21, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

For the last couple of months, we’ve been taking flak from some of our readers over our election coverage. Here’s a sample of Facebook comments from a recent story, headlined “Sanders Extends His Lead in Wyoming.”

“You hate Bernie.” “Boy the media hates her!”

Journalists like us typically shrug off this kind of criticism. When we make people on both sides mad, we must be doing something right…right?

But Mother Jones is not your typical news organization, this isn’t your typical election season, and we’ve never been too much into doing things the way they’ve always been done. So we wanted to take a different tack this time and address these concerns with you, head-on.

We won’t be coy: This is about building a relationship, and we’re going to ask for money.

Mother Jones is a reader-supported nonprofit, and that means we rely on donations and magazine subscriptions for 70 percent of our annual budget. It also means that by April 30, we need to raise $175,000 from readers like you to stay on track.

So the easiest thing to do, in some ways, would be taking it easy on our election coverage so as not to upset any of you while we’re asking for your support—we know Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders appeal to a lot of our readers. But taking it easy on anything is not in our DNA; in fact, it’s exactly the opposite of what (we think) you want us to do.

We’ll explain why we believe that—but if you don’t need to read more, please make your tax-deducible donation to help fund our reporting right now. (You can use PayPal, too, which could be easier if you’re reading this on your phone.)

Here’s one big thing about being supported by readers: No one tells us what to cover, or how. That means we’re free to do what good journalism has always done: Offend some of the people, all of the time.

Unlike some publications, we don’t endorse or support candidates. As a nonprofit, we’re legally prohibited from doing that, and, just as importantly, it would be counter to what we stand for journalistically. We’re not about telling you how to make up your mind. You do just fine on your own. What we are about is giving you the facts you need to do it—even when they are uncomfortable.

That often means going to extra lengths: Unlike a lot of “news” you read online, what we write goes through a real fact-checking process. (Read a great description of it, by one of our ace former researchers, here.)

And it means digging in places where others aren’t. Back in 2012, pundits insisted that voters didn’t really care about the 0.01 percent and their disproportionate influence in politics—until we revealed how Mitt Romney had told his big-ticket donors that 47 percent of Americans were moochers. Two years ago, when few were talking about Clinton’s links to the fossil fuel industry, we did a major investigative feature on her support for fracking as secretary of state; now her links to the fossil fuel industry are a big issue. Last summer, we ran the first in-depth piece on Sanders’ political evolution (and put an illustration of him on Mount Rushmore on the cover of our magazine); it took months for other major outlets to take him seriously. Since then, we’ve both covered the breaking news in the race and dug deeper on the strong points and weak points of both candidates—because that’s the job you want us to do.

Stories that make some of our readers uncomfortable don’t just happen during a presidential election. The increase in mass shootings and the influence of the National Rifle Association, the neuroscience behind racism, the incredible amount of water it takes to grow a single almond—we’ve gotten pushback from a lot of people about these stories, too, but they’ve also turned into mainstays of the public debate.

And that’s what we’re aiming for: substantive reporting that challenges conventional wisdom. There are plenty of places that serve up content to affirm what their readers already believe. But we think you deserve better.

Do we expect our biggest critics to open up their wallets to support us after reading this? Nope. But being a reader-supported nonprofit means building a real relationship with our audience, and that starts with trust. We hope there are enough of you who trust us to provide information you won’t find anywhere else—even if, especially if, it challenges your own preconceptions.

Continue reading here: 

Why We’re Tough on The Candidates You Like

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Why We’re Tough on The Candidates You Like

After New York Win, Clinton Campaign Says Sanders’ Attacks Help Republicans

by KrystleLaughlin Posted on April 20, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

After a decisive victory in New York on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton’s campaign called on Bernie Sanders to strike a more positive tone in the final two months of the primary contest, hinting that the senator from Vermont should ultimately leave the race gracefully without damaging the party’s chances of winning in the fall. As an example for how Sanders should conduct his campaign, a Clinton aide pointed to how the then-Sen. Clinton helped unite the party behind Barack Obama in 2008.

Speaking with reporters after Clinton’s victory rally in Manhattan Tuesday night, Clinton campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri called on Sanders to run a more positive, issue-based campaign. “He needs to decide as he closes out the Democratic primary, if he is going to continue on the destructive path that he started down in the New York primary where he is making personal character attacks against her that mimic the attacks that Republicans make and aid Republicans, or if he is going to end this primary the way that he promised to run—the kind of campaign he said he would run—that was focused on issues,” she said. “There’s no question that Sen. Sanders, that the behavior of him and his campaign has been destructive.”

Palmieri pointed to Sanders’ recent comment that Clinton is not qualified to be president—a remark Sanders quickly walked back—as well as his assertion in the last debate that he questioned her judgment. She also noted that the Sanders campaign on Monday accused the Clinton campaign of campaign finance violations.

Palmieri cited Clinton’s own example in the 2008 primary against Obama as a guide for Sanders. Because Clinton stayed in that race until June, she said the Clinton team respects Sanders’ decision to see the race through to the end. But, she noted, Clinton did not contest Obama’s win at the Democratic National Convention in Denver that year.

Palmieri did not note the nasty tone of the 2008 contest. “I think she set a gold standard for how people who don’t end up with the nomination, who lose in that effort, should come together and help the party,” she said. “Given the primary that they went through, where they both went all the way to the end, very hard fought, to come and ask to play that role and be the person to who says, ‘By acclamation, I say this party stands behind this nominee and he’s going to be our next president’…that’s what we have seen happen before. We think that can happen again.”

More:  

After New York Win, Clinton Campaign Says Sanders’ Attacks Help Republicans

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on After New York Win, Clinton Campaign Says Sanders’ Attacks Help Republicans

Bernie Sanders Has Really Pissed Off Margaret Archer

by Yvonne9866 Posted on April 8, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Bernie Sanders is headed to the Vatican:

Whether or not the pope shares the Vermont senator’s enthusiasm for Eugene Debs, he’s “feeling the Bern” enough to have invited the Jewish presidential candidate to speak at the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, during a conference on social, economic, and environmental issues. Sanders will head to Rome immediately after the April 14 Democratic debate in Brooklyn.

But apparently the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences is decidedly not feeling the Bern:

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders reached out to obtain his invitation to the Vatican and showed “monumental discourtesy” in the process, a senior Vatican official said.

“Sanders made the first move, for the obvious reasons,” Margaret Archer, president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, which is hosting the conference Sanders will attend, said in a telephone interview. “I think in a sense he may be going for the Catholic vote but this is not the Catholic vote and he should remember that and act accordingly—not that he will.“

Huh. I wonder what Bernie did to piss off Margaret Archer? Maybe it has something to do with his views on conflation:

Margaret Archer argues that much social theory suffers from the generic defect of conflation where, due to a reluctance or inability to theorize emergent relationships between social phenomena, causal autonomy is denied to one side of the relation. This can take the form of autonomy being denied to agency with causal efficacy only granted to structure (downwards conflation). Alternatively it can take the form of autonomy being denied to structure with causal efficacy only granted to agency (upwards conflation).

…In contradistinction Archer offers the approach of analytical dualism. While recognizing the interdependence of structure and agency (i.e. without people there would be no structures) she argues that they operate on different timescales. At any particular moment, antecedently existing structures constrain and enable agents, whose interactions produce intended and unintended consequences, which leads to structural elaboration and the etc. etc.

Does that help? No? Sorry about that. I guess someone will have to ask Archer just what Bernie did that was so monumentally discourteous. Was it merely asking for an invitation in the first place? Is it the fact that Bernie is pro-choice? Or something more? We need someone to dig into the Vatican gossip machine and let us know.

Read this article:

Bernie Sanders Has Really Pissed Off Margaret Archer

Posted in alternative energy, FF, GE, LG, ONA, solar, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Bernie Sanders Has Really Pissed Off Margaret Archer

The New York Daily News Just Hit Bernie Sanders Where It Hurts

by CaridadHaydon Posted on April 6, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Continuing our coverage of the New York Daily News‘ coverage of the 2016 presidential election, here is the tabloid’s cover today:

Bernie Sanders’ poor track record on guns has become a point of much consternation. The Clinton campaign thinks the issue is a big winner against the Vermont senator and has worked hard to keep it front and center in advance of New York’s April 19th primary.

Read original article:  

The New York Daily News Just Hit Bernie Sanders Where It Hurts

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The New York Daily News Just Hit Bernie Sanders Where It Hurts

This Is Why Sanders Can Stay in the Race Until the Bitter End

by LavonRoyston Posted on April 5, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The delegate math is daunting for Bernie Sanders. As numbers-cruncher Nate Silver explained last week, the democratic socialist senator from Vermont has to win handily big states—most notably New York and California—in order to close his gap with Hillary Clinton in the pledged delegate count, and then he must convince hundreds of superdelegates to back him.

But Sanders will be able to fight to the very end, for one simple reason: He has a lot of money. Each month this year, the Sanders campaign has raised more money than the last. In January, he hauled in $20 million; in February, $43.5 million; and in March, $44 million. (Clinton raised $29.5 million in March.) And while Sanders is spending that money at a fast clip, he is collecting enough to sustain the high burn rate. The campaign spent $50 million in February yet ended the month with more cash in the bank ($17.2 million) than at the beginning of the month ($14.7 million). There is no complete data available yet for March.

Continue Reading »

Link: 

This Is Why Sanders Can Stay in the Race Until the Bitter End

Posted in alternative energy, Anchor, ATTRA, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Is Why Sanders Can Stay in the Race Until the Bitter End