Tag Archives: south

Meet Bernie’s Ragtag Band of Congressional Supporters

by LatoshaCaro Posted on February 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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Following his decisive loss to Hillary Clinton in South Carolina, Bernie Sanders landed a mixed bag of surprise endorsements: one from a notoriously volatile hedge fund manager-turned-congressman, who is under investigation for potential ethics violations, and the other from a rising star of the Democratic party.

On Monday morning, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) announced his support online in a blog post titled “I Feel the Bern.” Grayson, a super-delegate who is serving his third term in the House, said that a recent online poll he conducted showed 86 percent support for Sanders (this number is at odds with national polls, which show Sanders down 7.5 percent against Hillary Clinton as of Monday).

While the Sanders campaign thanked Grayson, his support may not be doing it any favors. Grayson has been in favor of regulating Wall Street, but raised eyebrows with his decision to continue running a hedge fund while he served in the House of Representatives. That decision prompted an ongoing House Committee on Ethics inquiry and a searing New York Times investigation published earlier this month, which alleged that during difficult economic times he paid attention to the hedge fund at the expense of his congressional duties. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has urged Grayson to drop his bid for the Florida Senate seat. Grayson denies any wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) on Sunday resigned as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee to endorse Sanders (as chairwoman, she was not allowed to support a candidate). In a filmed speech posted to her official YouTube account, Gabbard said, “I cannot remain neutral any longer. The stakes are just too high…We can elect a president who will lead us into more interventionist wars of regime change, or we can elect a president who will usher in a new era of peace and prosperity.”

Gabbard’s decision follows a public squabble with DNC leadership last year after she appeared on MSNBC calling for more Democratic presidential debates. The DNC had faced criticism for limiting the number of televised debates, which was seen as a ploy to protect Hillary Clinton’s candidacy from the insurgent Sanders’ campaign.

These two unexpected endorsements nearly double the ranks of elected lawmakers supporting Sanders—he still only has 5. Clinton, meanwhile, has racked up more than 200, including 12 governors and a host of former Congressional colleagues.

Sanders thanked both Grayson and Gabbard for their endorsements.

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Meet Bernie’s Ragtag Band of Congressional Supporters

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Hillary Clinton Crushes Bernie Sanders in South Carolina

by StefanieLuce Posted on February 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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This is nuts. Yesterday Pollster had Hillary Clinton ahead in South Carolina by about 20 points. Today they added one new poll, and they have her ahead by 50 points—which is about what she won by.

Did Bernie really lose 30 points of support in the past two weeks? That’s what the polls seem to show. But why? And how did the press not pick up on this? Most of the coverage I’ve seen has suggested that, sure, Hillary is going to win, but she’s really being pressed in the black community and Bernie could do better than expected. But according to the exit polls, she ended up winning 84 percent of the black vote. And perhaps even more worryingly for Bernie, she even crushed him among voters who agree that our economic system favors the wealthy. That’s his wheelhouse, and he won only 30 percent of their vote.

We’ll know more after Tuesday, but this doesn’t look good for Sanders. If Hillary racks up a big win on Super Tuesday, she’ll be so far ahead in the delegate count she’ll be almost mathematically unbeatable. At that point, it will be pretty hard for him to justify staying in the race.

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Hillary Clinton Crushes Bernie Sanders in South Carolina

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Hillary Clinton Just Won the South Carolina Primary

by CelsaLuster317 Posted on February 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton won the South Carolina Democratic primary handily on Saturday, according to multiple news outlets, which called the race as soon as the polls closed. Just days before Super Tuesday, her win underscores what many pundits have been saying all along—despite her opponent Bernie Sanders’ surprise success in early states, Clinton still holds critical sway among Southern black voters.

According to preliminary exit polls, more than 60 percent of South Carolina primary voters were black; an astounding 84 percent of them voted for Clinton. Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, have long been popular among black voters, while Sanders has struggled to make his message resonate in the state.

Clinton worked hard to consolidate her support in the lead-up to the primary, traveling to far-flung corners of the state and deploying Bill Clinton for good measure. Sanders, by contrast, appeared to be looking ahead to primaries in other states.

The real test for both campaigns comes Tuesday, when 11 states, American Samoa, and Democrats abroad will all vote on their choice for the Democratic nomination.

This story has been updated.

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Hillary Clinton Just Won the South Carolina Primary

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Let Us Take a Minute to Fully Appreciate the Current State of American Politics

by JeannetteHuddle Posted on February 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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Do you remember this famous video of the South Korean parliament from a few years ago?

How infantile! This is supposed to be a mature democracy. What the hell is going on?

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I give you Marco Rubio on Friday morning, making his case against Donald Trump:

Can you feel the burn? And here is Trump a few hours later making his case against Rubio:

Makes you proud to be an American, doesn’t it? The presidential campaign of one of our great political parties has now degenerated into two guys in suits insulting each other for sweating a lot during a debate.

By the way, Trump’s schtick came during an event where he announced the endorsement of New Jersey governor Chris Christie. Trump now has the following endorsements:

Sarah Palin, crackpot former Republican VP candidate.
Teresa Giudice, star of Real Housewives of New Jersey.
Geert Wilders, Dutch Islamaphobe and leader of the Party for Freedom.
Joe Arpaio, famous Arizona sheriff fond of chain gangs, dressing inmates in pink underwear, feeding them moldy food, and too many other lunatic acts to count.
Paul LePage, wingnut governor of Maine governor who memorably said that Maine’s biggest problem was “guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty….they come up here, they sell their heroin.”
David Duke, noted white supremacist and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
Alex Jones, insane talk radio conspiracy monger.
Jerry Falwell Jr., evangelical leader of Liberty University, whose endorsement came despite Trump’s well-known string of affairs, remarriages, skinflint charitable giving, and apparent lack of any serious Christian faith.
Ann Coulter, political commentator noted for her Islamaphobia, hatred of illegal immigrants, and general descent into highly-calculated derangement.
Dennis Rodman, famous basketball player and friend to Kim Jung-un
Juanita Brodderick and Paula Jones, who both made sketchy but famous accusations of sexual harrassment against Bill Clinton.
Willie Robertson, homophobic star of Duck Dynasty.
Carl Paladino, racist emailer and secret-daughter-hiding former Republican candidate for New York governor.
Chris Christie, ambitious, tough-guy governor of New Jersey embroiled in a controversy over punishing a political opponent by deliberately shutting down two lanes on the George Washington bridge and tying up traffic for miles.

This man is currently leading the national Republican polls by more than 20 points over his nearest competitor.

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Let Us Take a Minute to Fully Appreciate the Current State of American Politics

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Jeb Bush Drops Out of the Race for the GOP Presidential Nomination

by WilfredCormier Posted on February 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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Jeb Bush is out. After disappointing finishes in Iowa, New Hampshire, and now South Carolina, the former Florida governor announced Saturday evening that he is ending his run for the GOP presidential nomination.

“Tonight I am suspending my campaign,” said an emotional and tired-looking Bush. “Yeah, I am,” he confirmed, after a few people in the crowd shouted, “No!”

“In this campaign I have stood my ground, refusing to bend to the political winds,” he said. “Ideas matter, policy matters.”

To his fellow GOP contenders, Bush congratulated the candidates still “on the island.” Bush, who has taken an aggressive stance recently against front-runner Donald Trump, did not take this opportunity to attack the business mogul.

Bush’s debate performances steadily improved throughout the campaign, particularly when he began to take on Trump. But that failed to give his sagging campaign the lift it needed. Bush came in sixth place in Iowa, fourth in New Hampshire, and is at the back of the pack in South Carolina, far behind Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio. For weeks, the press has noted the sad tone of Bush’s struggling campaign. Tonight, it’s finally over.

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Jeb Bush Drops Out of the Race for the GOP Presidential Nomination

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Donald Trump Wins South Carolina Primary

by ClydeBrigstocke Posted on February 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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Like it or not, Donald Trump is in the driver’s seat for the Republican presidential nomination.

The networks called the South Carolina primary for Trump shortly after polls closed on Saturday, with Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida locked in a battle for second place. Over the last week of the campaign, Trump’s opponents worked hard to spin anything less than an overwhelming victory as a disappointing showing for the billionaire real estate mogul, but make no mistake about it: Trump’s win is a big deal. He has now finished second, first, and first in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, three states that have very little in common. He has won the latter two by overwhelming pluralities. And he has history on his side: Only one candidate has ever lost South Carolina and won the nomination, and that candidate, Mitt Romney, finished in second in 2012. If his name were anything other than “Donald Trump,” the party’s leaders would be penciling him in for the final speaking spot at their convention in Cleveland.

Trump used South Carolina as a backdrop for some of his most overheated pronouncements. He promoted his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States while speaking aboard a decommissioned aircraft carrier in Charleston Harbor. He called Pope Francis “disgraceful” for questioning his proposal to build a wall on the Mexican border. And in his final event of the primary campaign on Friday night, he told the audience an apocryphal story about General John Pershing executing 49 Muslims with bullets coated in pig blood. His biggest argument against Cruz’s candidacy was that the senator was unnecessarily squeamish about torture. Shortly after polls opened on Saturday, Trump tweeted that President Barack Obama would likely have attended Antonin Scalia’s funeral if it had been held at a mosque. Opponents, notably former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, sought to cast Trump as boorish and unpresidential. They misunderstood the race.

Trump didn’t win in spite of being a boor, a bigot, and an analog internet troll; he won because he was proudly all those things. For all the diversions (who picks a fight with the pope, anyway?), he articulated a remarkably clear theory of politics: Other people are screwing you over, and I’m going to stop it. “He’s got balls,” Julia Coates, a longtime Trump fan, told me as we waited for the real estate magnate to take the stage in North Charleston. “He’s got big ones. And that’s what we need. I’m tired of all this shit going on.” It’s the kind of approach that plays poorly among the genteel Southerners who crowd into Low Country town halls in boat shoes and Nantucket red. But he recognized the electorate as something greater—and angrier. If you hadn’t voted in decades, Trump was your guy. If you felt betrayed by the people you had voted for, Trump was also your guy.

If Trump was a winner, then everyone else is (to use his term of choice) a loser—including Rubio, who finished third in Iowa and a disappointing fifth in New Hampshire. Now you can add the South to the list of regions that have been less than receptive to his pitch. It’s not because he didn’t make his message clear. Over the last week, he cast himself as the anti-Trump, a fresh-faced Cuban American who could lead the party into the future. He toured the state with rising star Rep. Trey Gowdy; the state’s African America senator, Tim Scott; and its Indian American governor, Nikki Haley, who joked that the quartet looked like a “Benetton commercial.” Rubio bet the house on the idea that South Carolina was ready for the future and mentioned the Republican front-runner only in passing during his speeches, and never by name. Trump stuck with the past; he went all-in on white identity politics and, like Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush before him, came through unscathed—two divorces be damned.

In actual terms, the biggest loser was Bush, whose campaign is on life support after finishing far behind in a state that helped make his brother president 16 years ago. In a last-gasp effort at upping his numbers in South Carolina, he brought George W.—who was kept at arm’s length for most of the campaign—to North Charleston for a megarally where they chest-bumped backstage. And he blanketed the radio airwaves with an endorsement from the ex-president. Jeb pushed hard to position himself as a commander in chief in a state with one of the highest percentages of military families in the nation.

But even his supporters seemed to recognize the end was near. At a town hall in Summerville, in an open-air pavilion overlooking a golf course (Bush never tried too hard to shake the “country club” label), one questioner after another all but called him a wimp. As the event wrapped up, a voter told the younger Bush that he was a big fan of Dubya but questioned whether Jeb had the toughness for the job. “Can you be a sonofabitch?” he asked. Jeb didn’t say yes.

From here, the Republican field moves on to Nevada and then Super Tuesday, on March 1. Thanks to the efforts of a Southern bloc, that historic bellwether will be loaded up with states that look about as friendly to Trump as South Carolina did. (Not that he needs to drop his g’s to win votes—he cleaned up in New Hampshire, too.) There’s also a lot of time for him to screw it up, although short of lighting an American flag on fire in Times Square, it’s not clear what that would even look like. The more likely scenario is that his opponents and their backers might finally spend real money attacking him on the airways—just $9 million of the $215 million spent by conservative super-PACs this cycle has been on anti-Trump ads. But don’t let Trump’s army of Republican critics say South Carolina doesn’t matter. They’ve been saying for years and years that it does. And they’re absolutely right.

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Donald Trump Wins South Carolina Primary

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Phil Robertson Says Vote for Ted Cruz Before We All Fall Into the Pit of Hell

by Glinda6958 Posted on February 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson told conservative voters in South Carolina on Friday that “godly” Sen. Ted Cruz offered them the best chance at preventing the United States from becoming “hell on Earth.”

Appearing at a packed theater at the College of Charleston, Cruz was accompanied by a squad of conservative favorites the day before voters hit the polls in the critical South Carolina Republican presidential primary. This group of Cruz backers included Rush Limbaugh’s brother, David, and Rep. Mark Sanford, who was once governor of the state and famously caused a scandal when he disappeared to see a mistress but told his staff he was hiking the Appalachian Trail.

Yet it was Robertson the audience came to see; some supporters even brought their own duck calls. Robertson tried to take front-runner Donald Trump down a notch by showing that Cruz has a reality television star of his own in his corner and, more important, God on his side.

Robertson’s endorsement of Cruz could almost fit in a tweet. As Fox News host Sean Hannity interviewed Cruz on the stage, Robertson, clutching a Bible, walked up in camo attire and declared, “I’m for Cruz because you see this in my hand? Bibles and guns brought us here. And it will be Bibles and guns that keeps us here. And this man owns them both.” Then Robertson picked up his camo backpack and walked back through the curtains.

About 15 minutes later, Robertson returned to the stage and read aloud from a book about presidents who pray. Prayer was the reason the United States won its independence, he explained, and it might be the only thing that could save the nation from its current fate. He expanded on his previous pitch for Cruz. “You say, ‘Phil, you either got mighty lucky or God blessed you,'” he said. “But you know something, South Carolina? Can all the money the money I evvvvver make, can it remove your sin, South Carolina? That money? What about all this fame I received—will it raise me from the dead? That’s why I follow Jesus. That’s why I vote for people who follow Jesus.”

Robertson continued: “We went with the atheists beginning about 50 years ago, and we’ve almost created in America a hell on Earth. Vote godly. I love you, and I love God. It’s the only way to roll.”

Cruz embraced Robertson warmly. In the past few days, Cruz has suggested that if he were elected president, he would nominate Utah tea party Sen. Mike Lee to the Supreme Court and ask Trump to build a wall on the Mexican border. Now he told the crowd there might also be a place for Robertson in his administration. “Can you imagine Phil Robertson as ambassador to the United Nations?” Cruz asked. “How much would you pay to see that?”

As the South Carolina contest hurdles toward its conclusion—and after Cruz has spent months hammering his opponents (especially Marco Rubio) on immigration—he is pushing a more fundamental message to voters on his final swing through the state: Vote for Cruz so that he can bring God back to America.

Cruz finished the event with a prayer. “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways,” Cruz said, reciting from memory 2 Chronicles 7:14, “then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sins.”

The audience knew the rest and finished the prayer with him: “And I will heal their land.”

By the way, here’s a commercial that Robertson made with Cruz a few weeks ago:

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Phil Robertson Says Vote for Ted Cruz Before We All Fall Into the Pit of Hell

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Watch Donald Trump Respond to Evidence He Once Supported the Invasion of Iraq

by MadisonZepps Posted on February 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump acknowledged Thursday night that is was possible he supported the invasion of Iraq during a 2002 interview with radio host Howard Stern—despite his campaign’s persistent criticisms of the Iraq War and George W. Bush’s record as Commander-in-Chief. The audio was uncovered and published Thursday night by Buzzfeed.

“It was probably the first time I was asked that question,” Trump said during the televised town hall appearance on CNN. “By the time the war started, I was against the war.”

“Don’t forget, I wasn’t a politician,” Trump said. “So people didn’t write everything I said. I was a businessperson.” Watch the clip:

Earlier in the night, Trump attacked George W. Bush for the decision to invade Iraq, saying it “may have been the worst decision ever made by any president in history.” But he refused to repeat his earlier accusations that Bush deliberately lied to the American people.

The town hall came at the end of a big day for Trump, in which Pope Francis questioned Trump’s Christianity for wanting to build a wall on the US-Mexico border. (Trump said on CNN that Mexico may have put the Pope up to it.)

It’s the final televised event before South Carolina’s Republican primary this Saturday.

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Watch Donald Trump Respond to Evidence He Once Supported the Invasion of Iraq

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Clinton’s Surrogates Are Banking on the Gun Issue to Win Over Black Voters

by PalmaShupe Posted on February 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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After her sound defeat in New Hampshire on Tuesday night, former Sen. Hillary Clinton is looking ahead to the primary in South Carolina, where she hopes her record and rhetoric on gun control will impress black voters and propel her to victory over Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

In a conference call Wednesday, Congressman Hakeem Jeffries joined Hazel Dukes—the former NAACP president and current president of the civil rights group’s New York State Conference—and South Carolina state minority leader J. Todd Rutherford to promote Clinton and to cite the inexperience of her rival. The three criticized Sanders as a newcomer to issues important to black voters, and condemned what they called his inferior record on gun control and criminal-justice reform.

“I’ve watched Bernie Sanders on the campaign trail and seen how he only really started talking about issues concerning African Americans in the past 40 days,” Rutherford said. “Secretary Clinton has talked about these same issues, and advocated for us, for the last 40 years.”

They also slammed Sanders for only recently moving over to the Democratic party, for voting in favor of the infamous 1994 Violent Crimes Bill, and for voting for an amendment that Jeffries claimed would have allowed Charleston shooter Dylann Roof to obtain a handgun before the completion of a background check.

“We know that Hillary Clinton has consistently stood up against the gun lobby, and spoken out against the epidemic of gun violence in the African American community and beyond. The record of Bernie Sanders is very different,” Jeffries said. “He’s twice voted to shield gun manufacturers, who I often refer to as ‘merchants of death;’ he voted to overturn a ban on guns on Amtrak trains; he voted to make it harder to crack down on gun dealers who break the law; he even voted for an amendment that would have allowed, or which allowed, of course, the Charleston shooter to get a gun before his background check is completed.” If you compare Clinton and Sanders on the issue of gun violence and how it affects the black community, Jeffries added, “it’s not even a close call.”

Jeffries, Rutherford, and Dukes answered reporters’ questions about Clinton’s own, arguably dubious, track record on issues that affect black communities—including her “superpredator” comments—with praise of her political experience and her platform for economic justice. But the overarching theme of the call was that Clinton, unlike Sanders—who represents a predominantly white state—has always been a visible presence in the black community.

“It’s good to have new friends, but I would rather have true friends,” Jeffries said.

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Clinton’s Surrogates Are Banking on the Gun Issue to Win Over Black Voters

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Two Prominent Black Intellectuals Just Delivered More Bad News for Clinton

by GabrielaN24 Posted on February 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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After a crushing loss in New Hampshire on Tuesday night, Hillary Clinton may be having an even worse morning. As her campaign turns to South Carolina, where she hopes to win the primary with the support of African American voters on February 27, two prominent black intellectuals issued forceful statements Wednesday morning that could boost her rival, Bernie Sanders.

“I will be voting for Sen. Sanders,” Ta-Nehisi Coates, a correspondent for The Atlantic and the author of the 2015 National Book Award winner Between the World and Me, said Wednesday in an interview on Democracy Now! Coates has written critically of Sanders recently for not embracing reparations for African Americans as part of his economic and social justice platform.

A much stronger rebuke of Clinton came from Michelle Alexander, the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, who blasted the former secretary of state in an essay published Wednesday on the website of The Nation titled “Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote.” In it, Alexander argued that the economic and criminal justice policies of the Bill Clinton administration, from the 1994 crime bill to welfare reform in 1996, were devastating to African Americans—and that Hillary Clinton was a force in that administration whose role should be scrutinized and whose current positions on criminal justice and racial equality are not strong enough.

Ironically, perhaps, Alexander cites Coates at the end of the essay in also critiquing Sanders.

This is not an endorsement for Bernie Sanders, who after all voted for the 1994 crime bill. I also tend to agree with Ta-Nehisi Coates that the way the Sanders campaign handled the question of reparations is one of many signs that Bernie doesn’t quite get what’s at stake in serious dialogues about racial justice. He was wrong to dismiss reparations as “divisive,” as though centuries of slavery, segregation, discrimination, ghettoization, and stigmatization aren’t worthy of any specific acknowledgement or remedy.

But recognizing that Bernie, like Hillary, has blurred vision when it comes to race is not the same thing as saying their views are equally problematic. Sanders opposed the 1996 welfare-reform law. He also opposed bank deregulation and the Iraq War, both of which Hillary supported, and both of which have proved disastrous. In short, there is such a thing as a lesser evil, and Hillary is not it.

Coates and Alexander are by no means the first black intellectuals to express skepticism of Clinton and endorse Sanders. Princeton University professor Cornel West, for example, has campaigned with Sanders. On Wednesday morning, Sanders traveled to Harlem to have breakfast with the Rev. Al Sharpton.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, the Washington Post reported that Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), the most prominent black politician in South Carolina, is considering endorsing Clinton. She still has plenty of backing in the black political establishment. But the comments from Coates and Alexander Wednesday are a sign that the degree of support Clinton is counting on from the black community might be slipping away, and that she may not be able to sew up the black vote in South Carolina, as her supporters have long predicted.

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Two Prominent Black Intellectuals Just Delivered More Bad News for Clinton

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