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Bernie Sanders Says He’s Being "Lectured" by Hillary Clinton on Foreign Policy

by KourtneyHrz Posted on February 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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Bernie Sanders was defensive when he was asked at Thursday’s Democratic presidential debate why he doesn’t talk more about how he’d approach being commander-in-chief. So does he plan on changing course anytime soon? Not a chance.

On Sunday afternoon in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, speaking at the same community college that hosted Hillary Clinton on Saturday, Sanders did not mention foreign policy until the 50th minute of a 54-minute speech. Even then, he kept it short, telling supporters (and a few undecided voters) he was tired of being “lectured” by his opponent on the issue. “And by the way,” he said, as he wrapped up his remarks, “as somebody who voted against the war in Iraq—who led the opposition to the war in Iraq, lately I have been lectured on foreign policy. The most important foreign policy in the modern history of this country was the war in Iraq. I was right on that issue. Hillary Clinton was wrong on that issue.”

And then he moved on. In one of his final get-out-the-vote events before Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, Sanders showed a willingness to continue taking the fight to Clinton on his own terms. The speech he gave on Sunday, his voice still hoarse from his appearance on Saturday Night Live with Larry David, was much the same speech he delivered in Boston in October, and in Burlington in May. He excoriated the oligarchs who he believes corrupt the political system and outlined a theory of change, from the suffrage movement to civil rights to gay rights, that he believes shows that grassroots movements like his own can overturn the system. The routine is so familiar that when he asked his audience who the biggest recipient of federal welfare is, about half of those in attendance were able to answer—”Walmart.”

What’s changed is the crowd. When I saw him in Boston in October, the crowd booed 17 different times during his speech, prompted by references to Jeb Bush or the Koch brothers. On Sunday, that number was halved in a speech of equal length. (Targets of booing included the black and Latino unemployment rate, speaker fees from Goldman Sachs, and companies that exploit loopholes in the tax code to avoid “paying a nickel in federal income taxes.”) Clinton refers to the animating ethos of Sanders’ supporters as “anger,” and there’s certainly that, but increasingly, there’s the optimism of an organization that truly thinks it can win.

That’s typified by one of the few tweaks he’s made to his speech over the last few months: He now talks about the poll numbers. “We started this campaign at 3 percent in the polls,” he told the crowd early on. “We were 30, 40 points down in New Hampshire. Well, a lot has changed.” Except for all the stuff that hasn’t.

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Bernie Sanders Says He’s Being "Lectured" by Hillary Clinton on Foreign Policy

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The Bernie vs. Hillary Fight Is Kind of Ridiculous

by BellaMaughan6 Posted on February 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Michigan senator Debbie Stabenow supports Hillary Clinton: “I think Bernie’s terrific as an advocate. There’s a difference between a strong community advocate and being someone who can get things done.” Martin Longman says this is an example of how nasty things are getting: “Breaking out the Sarah Palin talking points isn’t smart. Talk about how people view socialism all you want, but don’t dismiss community organizers or advocates. This isn’t a Republican campaign.”

I had to laugh at that. Nasty? I’d rate it about a 1 on the Atwater Scale. Toughen up, folks.

And speaking of this, it sure is hard to take seriously the gripes going back and forth between the Hillary and Bernie camps. Is it really the case that we can’t even agree on the following two points?

Sanders is more progressive than Clinton.
Clinton is more electable than Sanders.

I mean, come on. They’re both lefties, but Sanders is further left. The opposing arguments from the Clinton camp are laughable. Clinton is more progressive because she can get more done? Sorry. That’s ridiculous. She and Bill Clinton have always been moderate liberals, both politically and temperamentally. We have over two decades of evidence for this.

As for electability, I admire Sanders’ argument that he can drive a bigger turnout, which is good for Democrats. But it’s special pleading. The guy cops to being a socialist. He’s the most liberal member of the Senate by quite a margin (Elizabeth Warren is the only senator who’s close). He’s already promised to raise middle-class taxes. He can’t be bothered to even pretend that he cares about national security issues, which are likely to play a big role in this year’s election. He wants to spend vast amounts of money on social programs. It’s certainly true that some of this stuff might appeal to people like me, but it’s equally true that there just aren’t a lot of voters like me. Liberals have been gaining ground over the past few years, but even now only 24 percent of Americans describe themselves that way. Republicans would tear Sanders to shreds with hardly an effort, and there’s no reason to think he’d be especially skilled at fending off their attacks.

I like both Sanders and Clinton. But let’s stop kidding ourselves about what they are and aren’t. Republicans won’t be be swayed by these fantasies, and neither will voters. We might as well all accept it.

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The Bernie vs. Hillary Fight Is Kind of Ridiculous

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After Iowa, Both Parties Are Facing Hostile Takeovers

by SVDElise894 Posted on February 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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As Iowans trekked to caucuses across their state on Monday evening, both major political parties were on the verge of hostile takeovers. By night’s end, the Democratic establishment and Hillary Clinton had apparently held the threat at bay—barely!—with the former secretary of state seemingly defeating Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-professed democratic socialist channeling populist ire, by a small number of votes in what was almost a tie. On the Republican side, Sen. Ted Cruz, a nemesis of the GOP establishment, prevailed in Iowa the traditional way by rounding up evangelical and social conservative voters, and Donald Trump, the reality television tycoon, placed a close second (28 to 24 percent) with his they’re-all-losers schtick—meaning that half of Republican voters rebelled against their party’s poohbahs.

Anyone reading this knows the usual yada-yada-yada of Campaign 2016: this is the year of the outsiders. Donald Trump entered the Republican race, called everyone an idiot, and turned the GOP into the latest extension of Trump Empire™. Cruz, a onetime corporate lawyer (who happens to be married to a Goldman Sachs executive), campaigned as a pious bomb-thrower eager to take on the do-nothing status-quoticians of Washington (Republican and Democratic). And Bernie Sanders, the 74-year-old Vermont senator who a year ago was not even a Democrat, crashed Hillary Clinton’s coronation with his call for a “political revolution” that would break up the big banks, slam the billionaires class, and deliver single-payer health care and free college to all Americans. But this convenient, soundbite-friendly description of what’s going on is too easy an explanation, for the supposed outsider energy in each party is different, particularly when it comes to Trump.

Let’s start with the Dems. Sure, Sanders called for smashing up the big-money establishment and implied (strongly!) that Clinton, a Washington insider who has pocketed campaign cash and speaking fees from Wall Street, was part of the corrupt system. Not to take anything away from Sanders’ populist message and his campaign’s delivery, but he was able to take advantage of—that is, speak to—a pre-existing and ever restless ideological bloc within the Democratic primary electorate: progressives.

According to a Gallup poll taken last year, 44 percent of Democrats call themselves liberals. This number has been on a steady rise since 2000, when only 29 percent claimed that label. So as several Democratic strategists have pointed out to me in recent weeks—including those backing and not backing Clinton—Sanders began with a big potential base to tap. Call it the Elizabeth Warren Collection: populist-minded Democrats yearning for a crusader. Any Democratic candidate challenging Clinton with a heartfelt, authentic and enthusiastic progressive appeal had a chance to attract these Democratic voters. (This wing has always been there. In the 1980 Democratic primary, Teddy Kennedy won 37 percent of the vote to the 52 percent bagged by incumbent President Jimmy Carter.) It may be a bit of a mystery why former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley flopped so miserably in his effort to court these looking-for-a-hero Democrats. But the fiery Sanders, whose leftism was never in doubt, went for them, and when Clinton, whose progressivism has often been debated, seemed to stumble (those “damn emails”) and failed to inspire younger and more liberal Democrats, Sanders had an opening to present himself as this year’s true progressive model and a cool alternative to the ideologically-suspect and baggage-heavy Clinton. Voila! He made a connection with a major Democratic subset that has always been there.

Forget about Iowa for a moment—especially now that this unrepresentative event is done—and look at the average of the national polls in the Democratic race. Clinton leads Sanders, 52 to 37 percent. Sanders’ take is darn close to that 40-percent mark long associated with the progressive wing. Sanders surpassed that level in Iowa, and he’s likely to do so in New Hampshire, where three recent polls have put his lead over Clinton between 20 percent and 31 percent. Yet in the long run, can he continue to stay above 40-percent —particularly when the contest shifts to states with more diverse electorates (meaning more black and Latino voters) and states where voters are less familiar with this self-proclaimed socialist? Those contests will show whether Sanders has reshaped the party or whether he has only deftly addressed a desire Clinton could not fulfill.

Cruz did something similar to Sanders: he appealed to an ideological bloc that pines for a champion. With the collapse of Ben Carson, who at one point led the GOP pack in Iowa, Cruz, who fielded an effective on-the-ground organization, was able to consolidate much of the social conservative vote. (Carson placed a distant fourth behind Sen. Marco Rubio, who came in a close third with 23 percent.) Still, Trump’s ability to grab one out of four voters in Iowa—and his commanding lead in New Hampshire polls—indicates his bid to seize control of the Republican Party has not been neutralized.

Trump has not been waging an ideological war. He is no Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan. Just as there is a progressive base in the Democratic Party, there is a conservative foundation in the GOP, and those right-wing heroes of yesteryear won the Republican presidential contests (respectively in 1964 and 1980) by rallying the conservative grassroots within the GOP. At the time, each contended that the path to victory for the GOP was to beat back the more moderate elements of their party (Take that, Nelson Rockefeller! Ka-pow, George H.W. Bush!) and run to the right in November. (Only one of the two had their argument proven correct in the general election.) Theirs was an ideological mission. Cruz adopted this model, and he fared well in a state that has in recent years rewarded Republicans who appeal to the religious right. He’s an outsider in Washington, but not within this historical framework.

Trump’s play was not to become the leader of the party’s conservative wing. He’s been waging a cultural revolution, not an ideological rebellion, within the GOP. His main argument, such as it is, is not that the government is too big, but that everyone in government—and just about everyone who doesn’t agree with him—is stupid. And he’s a winner. (Well, at least until Monday night.) With his campaign, the political is the personal. His policy prescriptions, if they deserve to be called that, do not hew to a clear ideological line. He bashes hedge fund guys, calls for The Wall, wants less taxes, opposes trade deals backed by Big Business, decries the corruption of Washington (big-money donations and special-interest lobbyists), derides the US invasion of Iraq, but vows to obliterate ISIS with a massive, you-won’t-believe-how-big military built-up. It’s a mishmosh.

Trump is a protest candidate protesting…just about everything, as he peddles bigotry by pushing a ban on Muslims entering the United States. He’s not playing to the ideological voters of the GOP, but to the angry ones. His target audience: people who resent pushing 1 for English and 2 for Spanish. And I’m guessing many of these people have spent the last eight years detesting President Barack Obama, suspecting he’s some kind of secret Muslim, Kenya-born socialist who has a clandestine plan for destroying the United States of America. This hatred of Obama has been encouraged and exploited by leading Republicans who gained power in Washington with the tea party. These establishment GOPers giggled with delight as their mad-as-hell voters rushed to the polls, after being told that Obama was setting up death panels, that Obamacare would wreck the economy, that the president had once palled around with terrorists, and that Obama was feckless and dictatorial. They fed the beast. But that only created hunger for more hatred.

Enter Trump, who first auditioned for this role as a birther. Here was a guy brave enough to tell the Obama despisers the real truth. Here was a guy willing to target Muslims. Here was a guy who would characterize Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals. Here was a guy who would mock all those other Republicans who wouldn’t talk this way, essentially declaring them phony-baloney (and weak and ugly). The infuriated GOP voters who had bought the Republican propaganda that Obama has destroyed the United States gobbled all this up. Make America great, indeed. These are voters not seeking an ideological crusader who quotes the Constitution and presents intellectually sound arguments for smaller government and lower taxes. They are looking for a venter-in-chief who is as furious as they are and who promises that he and the nation will win, win, win.

The GOP unleashed the dogs of resentment and rage. And a bombastic, arrogant, demagogue billionaire shouted to them, “Follow me, not those louts in Washington.” Trump’s takeover of the GOP was going smoothly until Cruz, who has also tried to capitalize on right-wing resentment, bested Trump in Iowa, and Marco Rubio, a tea partier turned establishment favorite, came within 3,000 votes of bumping Trump to third. Now Trump’s going to have to try harder. And it will be interesting to see how voters respond to a diminished Trump. He still is positioned to do well in New Hampshire. And after that, why not Trump victories in South Carolina and Nevada (the land of casinos), and then the southern states that hold primary contests on Super Tuesday? But Cruz and Rubio will be nipping at his heels. (Watch the establishment money flood into Rubio’s campaign treasury.) And there’s no telling whether the Trump bubble has burst or whether he can return to the top of the heap with what will likely be an intensified effort to inflame the passions of irate voters.

After Iowa, the Democratic Party and Clinton are facing a fierce ideological challenge from an unlikely and previously underestimated source, while the Republican old guard is confronted by Cruz’s traditional assault and Trump’s unconventional attack. It’s the season of disruption.

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After Iowa, Both Parties Are Facing Hostile Takeovers

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Sanders Talks Up His Small Game on the Eve of His First Big Test

by MagdalenaSIVG Posted on February 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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For a presidential candidate aiming to come away with a big upset in Monday’s Iowa caucuses, Bernie Sanders closed out his final night before the the first votes are cast by wholeheartedly embracing his small-ball approach to campaigning. His final Iowa rally, to a crowd of 1,700 at Grand View University in Des Moines on Sunday, was introduced by a string of not-quite-A-list actors and musicians: Richmond Arquette (apparently there are as many Arquettes as Baldwins), Connor Paolo (Serena’s obnoxious younger brother on Gossip Girl), Josh Hutcherson (Peeta in The Hunger Games), and Foster the People.

The crowd played along, but didn’t really perk up until Sanders himself showed up. The senator from Vermont rolled through a 50-minute stump speech tackling the full range of his usual points—Walmart should pay a fair wage, health care should be run by the government, banks should have to pay for free public colleges—but took a little time early in his spiel to boast about how much less money he raised from big outside donors than his opponent, Hillary Clinton.

“My opponent yesterday announced that she had received some $45 million for her super-PAC,” Sanders said. “We announced that we zero dollars for our super-PAC.” (He didn’t mention the money that unions have spent on his campaign.) He continued, “We announced that we have received throughout this campaign—and this is so unbelievable, never in a million years would I have thought it possible—that we have received up to now 3.2 million individual contributions. That is more contributions than any candidate up to this point of a campaign in the history of the United States of America.”

Small ball does often win big games. Monday will reveal whether it’s sufficient to give Sanders the first big win of the race to the Democratic nomination.

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Sanders Talks Up His Small Game on the Eve of His First Big Test

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Poll: Most People Expect a Democratic Victory This November

by DonnieHagen2063 Posted on January 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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Here’s the latest projection of the general election from ABC News and the Washington Post:

This is not a poll of who people say they’ll vote for. It’s a poll of who they expect to win. I’m surprised that the public is apparently so sure of a Democratic victory, but I suppose that has a lot to do with the obvious turmoil in the Republican race.

In an interesting aside, the poll finds that voters are least comfortable at the prospect of a Trump presidency and most comfortable at the prospect of a Sanders presidency. Is that because they know the least about Sanders? Or because this whole business of being scared of a “socialist” in the White House is bunk? Hard to say.

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Poll: Most People Expect a Democratic Victory This November

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A Second Look at BernieCare

by ReganBobb049309 Posted on January 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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Last night I wrote that Bernie Sanders’ universal health care plan was “pretty good.” Over at Vox, Ezra Klein says it’s vague and unrealistic. Who’s right?

Both of us, I’d say. The Sanders plan is mostly a sketch of how he’d fund universal health care, and at that level I’d say it was pretty good if you evaluate it as a campaign document rather than a Brookings white paper. His numbers mostly added up, and from my point of view, his funding sources were roughly appropriate. Half or more of the funding comes from the middle class, with the rest coming from the rich. I’m OK with that.

But how about the actual mechanics of providing health care? Klein is pretty scathing about Sanders’ promise that his plan will cover everything with no copays or deductibles:

The implication to most people, I think, is that claim denials will be a thing of the past….What makes that so irresponsible is that it stands in flagrant contradiction to the way single-payer plans actually work….The real way single-payer systems save money isn’t through cutting administrative costs. It’s through cutting reimbursements to doctors, hospitals, drug companies, and device companies.

….But to get those savings, the government needs to be willing to say no when doctors, hospitals, drug companies, and device companies refuse to meet their prices, and that means the government needs to be willing to say no to people who want those treatments. If the government can’t do that — if Sanders is going to stick to the spirit of “no more fighting with insurance companies when they fail to pay for charges” — then it won’t be able to control costs.

The issue of how often the government says no leads to all sorts of other key questions — questions Sanders is silent on. For instance, who decides when the government says no? Will there be a cost-effectiveness council, like Britain’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence? Or will the government basically have to cover every treatment that can be proven beneficial, as is true for Medicare now? What will the appeals process be like?

This might sound technical, but it’s absolutely critical.

Klein is right that the mechanics of the plan are critical, and I probably should have done more than shrug that off as something that we’d get to later. Still, I think his criticism goes way too far. This is a campaign document. It’s obviously aspirational, and asking a presidential candidate to go into deep detail about the drawbacks of his policy is a little much. I can’t recall ever seeing that in my life. In a campaign, you sell the high points and then let critics take their shots.

That’s not to say that Sanders couldn’t have done more than he did. He could have and probably should have. In particular, he should have provided at least an outline of how his plan would work: who it covers, who employs doctors, what drives the cost savings, and so forth.

But my take is that Sanders was trying to accomplish something specific: he wanted to show that universal health care was affordable, and he wanted to stake out a position that Democrats should at least be dedicated to the idea of universal health care. I’d say he accomplished that in credible style. It’s fine to hold Sanders to a high standard, but it’s unfair to hold him to an Olympian standard that no presidential candidate in history has ever met. We health care wonks may be disappointed not to have more to chew on, but that’s life. We’ll get it eventually.

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A Second Look at BernieCare

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The 6 Best Moments of the Democratic Debate

by EdwardMedley9 Posted on January 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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With Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders neck and neck in the polls, the Democratic candidates met, along with former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, for the final debate before Iowa’s caucuses on February 1. Like the two prior debates, this one was held on a weekend night—likely diminishing the number of primary voters who tuned in.

Clinton and Sanders, who have traded attacks over the last several weeks on gun control, health care, and Wall Street reform, had a chance to spar in person. While the debate never turned nasty, it was certainly heated.

Hillary rips into Bernie over gun control.

Right off the bat, the moderators asked Sanders about one of the most contentious issues of the Democratic primary: gun control. Sanders defended himself against Clinton’s attacks over his record on gun control. “I have a D-minus voting record from the NRA,” Sanders said in response to accusations that his votes align with the National Rifle Association. “It was in 1988, there were three candidates running for Congress in the state of Vermont, I stood up to the gun lobby and came out and maintained the position that in this country we should not be selling military style assault weapons.”

Clinton responded by repeating her campaign’s attacks against his gun record, saying that Sanders “has voted with the NRA, with the gun lobby numerous times. He voted against the Brady Bill five times. He voted for what we call, the Charleston Loophole. He voted for immunity from gun makers and sellers which the NRA said, ‘was the most important piece of gun legislation in 20 years.'”

Hillary and Bernie battle over health care.

After a week of exchanging fire over health care, Clinton and Sanders finally faced off over the issue in person. Sanders, who released a health care plan hours before Sunday night’s debate, called for a “Medicare-for-all” system while Clinton argued that Democrats should focus on improving the Affordable Care Act instead of embarking on another major debate over health care.

“That is nonsense,” Sanders said at one point, growing noticeably irked after Clinton suggested that his push for single-payer health insurance is the same as a rollback of Obamacare.

Sanders attacks Clinton over Goldman Sachs speaking fees.

Sanders didn’t flinch when the moderators asked about the main difference between how he and Clinton would approach Wall Street. “The first difference is I don’t take money from big banks,” he said. “I don’t get personal speaking fees from Goldman Sachs.” From there, he dove into policy details, citing his enthusiasm for busting up the largest financial institutions and “21st century Glass-Steagall legislation” to separate commercial and investment banking.

Sanders returned to the topic later in the evening. “Secretary Clinton—and you’re not the only one, so I don’t mean to just point the finger at you, you’ve received over $600,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs in one year,” he said.

Sanders calls for Justice Department investigations when anyone dies “in police custody.”

Sanders extended his criminal justice agenda Sunday evening with an ambitious new proposal, calling for the federal government to get involved whenever someone dies in police custody—an occurrence that has been highlighted by the recent deaths of Sandra Bland in Texas and Freddie Gray in Baltimore. “Whenever anybody in this country is killed while in police custody, it should automatically trigger a U.S. attorney general’s investigation,” Sanders said.

Clinton describes her relationship with Vladimir Putin.

During her time as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton famously spearheaded the Obama administration’s efforts to “reset” relations with Russia. But, since these overtures, Russian President Vladimir Putin has become increasingly bellicose and aggressive on the international stage. How would Clinton now describe her relationship with the Russian leader? “It’s, um, interesting,” Clinton said after a long pause, clearly choosing her words carefully.

Clinton calls attention to the crisis in Flint, Michigan.

In her closing remarks, Clinton raised the plight of the people of Flint, Michigan—where toxic levels of lead in the city’s drinking water has created a state of emergency—as an example of the kind of problem she wants to solve as president.

“Every single American should be outraged,” she declared. “We’ve had a city in the United States of America, which the population is poor in many ways and majority African American, has been bathing and drinking lead-contaminated water. And the governor of that state acted as if he didn’t really care.” Clinton speculated that if children in a rich suburb of Detroit were exposed to contaminated water, the reaction would have been different. Clinton went on to discuss how she dispatched one of her campaign operatives to Flint “to see what I could to help.”

Sanders, who spoke last, also addressed the crisis in Flint. “I demanded the resignation of the governor,” he said, calling Republican Gov. Rick Snyder a man who “should not stay in power.”

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The 6 Best Moments of the Democratic Debate

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The Most-Searched Word of 2015 Is "Socialism"

by HildegardGoldber Posted on December 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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When Bernie Sanders first announced he was running for president back in April, many pundits were quick to dismiss the chances of a self-described “democratic socialist” defeating Hillary Clinton, let alone making it to the White House. But the Vermont senator quickly proved that his populist message could resonate with Democratic voters around the country.

There may be several reasons that “socialism” has become the most-searched term of the year, according to numbers put out by Merriam-Webster this week, but Sanders’ long-shot presidential bid deserves most of the credit. Merriam-Webster points to Sanders’ campaign as the cause for the 169 percent increase of look-ups for the word since 2014.

“Socialism has been near the top of our online dictionary look-up list for several years,” Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s editor-at-large, explained. “However, this year look-ups for socialism moved up even further, beginning with the July campaign events for Bernie Sanders, remaining high throughout the following months and spiking again after the first Democratic debate in October.”

Last month, the presidential hopeful gave a highly anticipated speech at Georgetown University explaining his views and defending democratic socialism. For more on that, check out our highlights of his address here.

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The Most-Searched Word of 2015 Is "Socialism"

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"I Rap About a Lot of the Stuff You Rant About": Killer Mike Interviews Bernie Sanders

by MildredWhittle Posted on December 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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When Bernie Sanders held a rally in Atlanta last month for his presidential campaign, the senator from Vermont was introduced by local rapper Killer Mike. Prior to the rally, Sanders and Killer Mike sat down to record an interview, which was released in six parts on Tuesday. “I rap about a lot of the stuff you rant about,” Killer Mike says at the start, before delving into a broad conversation about economics, criminal justice, gun control, and everything in between.

Killer Mike (born Michael Render) is half of the MC duo Run the Jewels, and has long laced his lyrics with messages about politics, activism, and social justice. His emergence as a popular political figure dates back to an onstage speech at a concert in St. Louis the night a grand jury decided to not to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson for the death of Michael Brown. Run the Jewels released a powerful music video tackling police violence earlier this year. Killer Mike is now the sort of artist who prompts print magazine profiles about how he’s reviving hip-hop as a political platform.

His interview with Sanders, conducted just before Thanksgiving at an Atlanta barbershop owned by Killer Mike, is not an objective examination of the candidate: Killer Mike gushes over Sanders, whom he had already endorsed earlier this summer. “That’s some bomb shit,” Killer Mike says by way of asking Sanders about his civil rights activism with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s.

“What we saw—if I can use some bomb shit—is our friends getting the shit kicked out of them and getting beaten to hell,” Sanders replies, explaining why he got involved while he was a student at the University of Chicago.

Sanders appears to be enjoying himself throughout most of the chat, awkwardly reaching over for fist bumps throughout the interview. He nods along while Killer Mike calls Donald Trump a fascist and compares him to Hitler and Mussolini. “You’re right, it is scary,” Sanders says of Trump’s campaign. When the two turn to marijuana decriminalization—”I’m a marijuana smoker and I think that’s absolute bullshit,” Mike says of the federal prohibition—Sanders backs him up. “Of course it’s crazy; everybody knows it’s crazy,” Sanders says.

Watch the six-part interview—in sections labeled “Economic Freedom,” “Social Justice,” “Rigged Economy,” “Free Health Care: It Ain’t a Big Deal,” “This Country Was Started As An Act Of Political Protest,” and “Democrats Win When People Vote”—below:

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"I Rap About a Lot of the Stuff You Rant About": Killer Mike Interviews Bernie Sanders

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Every Female Democratic Senator Is Backing Clinton—With One Notable Exception

by Zeniarwpzz Posted on November 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton will make a stop in Washington, DC, on Monday night to show off her resounding support from the Democratic women in the US Senate. At a “Women for Hillary” event near the Capitol, 13 of the 14 female Democratic senators will voice their support for Clinton’s presidential campaign, with backers ranging from moderates such as Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota to liberals including Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin.

But amid that overwhelming support, it’s the lone holdout that might be most notable: Elizabeth Warren.

The progressive icon from Massachusetts is one of the few Senate Democrats who have not yet endorsed Clinton. Of the 44 Democrats in the Senate, 38 have endorsed Clinton. (Bernie Sanders has yet to lock up public support from even one of his Senate colleagues.)

But Warren has been conspicuously reticent. A favorite of the progressive base who has been pushing her Democratic colleagues to be more openly liberal, Warren has yet to throw her support behind the Democratic front-runner. In 2013, Warren joined all other Democratic women in the Senate in signing a letter encouraging Clinton to enter the 2016 race. Warren and Clinton later met at Clinton’s DC home late last year while the former secretary of state was readying her campaign launch. During that meeting, Clinton reportedly asked for Warren’s advice but not her endorsement.

But since Clinton made her campaign official earlier this year, Warren has remained largely silent on presidential politics, with her few stray comments pointing to a reluctance to align her political brand with Clinton’s. In July, Warren implicitly called out Clinton at the annual progressive activist confab Netroots Nation, stating that she couldn’t see herself supporting a presidential candidate who wouldn’t ban the revolving-door windfall bonuses Wall Streeters receive when they take a government job in Washington. Warren specifically said her endorsement was contingent on a candidate’s support for a bill introduced by Baldwin to end these so-called golden parachutes. The following month, Clinton announced her support for the legislation, which has yet to receive a vote in the Senate.

Still, Warren hasn’t cozied up to the Clinton crowd. In August, Warren met with Vice President Joe Biden while he was still flirting with the idea of a presidential campaign. And at a book release event at a Senate office building last month, Warren used her opening remarks to attack Clinton’s campaign rhetoric. She didn’t name Clinton explicitly, but said she had been disappointed to watch the Democratic debates and see candidates dismissing the need to reinstate Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era law separating commercial and investment banking that was repealed under President Bill Clinton. With both Sanders and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley backing a new Glass-Steagall, Warren didn’t have to use Clinton’s name to make it clear who she was referring to when she said Democrats shouldn’t be asking if Glass-Steagall alone could have stopped the recent recession. “I think that’s just the wrong question to ask,” she said with exasperation, “the wrong point to make.”

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Every Female Democratic Senator Is Backing Clinton—With One Notable Exception

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