Category: US Politics

The BloombergTV version of #DemDebate highlights is exactly as you'd expect; meanwhile, Bernie continues to dodge the bashing.

~ jlpagano

Bloomberg? Hindenberg more like.

Having bought his way on to the stage, the former New York mayor was somehow unable to pay his own brain to come up with the right answers to the absolute thrashing he was given by the other candidates, particularly Elizabeth Warren, in Nevada on Wednesday night.

Yet his money has also bought him a TV station, so I had to laugh at the way his employees cobbled together a series of clips that came under the title “highlights”.

First and foremost, it has to be the only place you’ll find Bloomberg using a line which I have to assume he thought would win him the debate hands down. Check it out for yourself, it comes first in the above clip. In fairness, the package does include some attacks on him, but definitely not the most hard-hitting ones. Nothing about stop and frisk, nothing about refusing to release his employees from their Non Disclosure Agreements, nothing about his reported misogyny.

Personally, I reckon Bernie Sanders was the winner on the night. Warren definitely had a good night attacking those around her but I reckon she’s so far behind in the polls that her performance may have helped Sanders more than herself.

I think Bernie did really well to dodge the blows thrown at him – the usual ones on Medicare for All were harmless enough, but since he has pulled away as the front runner there are some new modes of attack, both of which are ambiguous yet well supported by the corporate media.

One such line of questioning is over the release of his medical records. A spokesperson for his campaign said this narrative was similar to Birtherism and she’s right. He has released letters from three different doctors with plenty of information following his heart attack last year. If he releases more, will that be enough to stop the media from pursuing the whole “what’s he hiding?” narrative?

Then there’s the so-called “Bernie Bro’s”. Apparently not only does Sanders have to take ownership of all the negative comments posted online by his “supporters”, he is also the only one with this problem. Both points are complete nonsense, yet the MSNBCs and CNNs of this world persist in highlighting them. Aren’t these the same people who went on about Russians creating fake account to stoke division in US politics?

It will be very interesting to see how the Nevada caucuses turn out this weekend. Assuming they do work out, that is, given what happened in Iowa. JLP

The smearing of Bernie Sanders by US corporate media reaches an all-time low. #Democrats2020

~ jlpagano

If this wasn’t so serious it would almost be funny.

Morning Joe is great when it comes to going after Trump but then they go and spoil it with ridiculous hit pieces like this one. You have to watch the clip to believe it. And by ‘believe it’ I mean the lengths to which they will go to cast any kind of doubt they can about Bernie.

To paraphrase : “Bernie Sanders has said several times that he voted against the Iraq War – well, we did some digging and it turns out that what REALLY happened was…blah, blah, blah, blah….and he voted against the Iraq War.”

Of course the key is in the ‘blah blah blah’ and I’ll let you watch the clip yourself to make up your own mind. To my ear it’s just a series of words put together so they could throw in the phrase “just like Joe Biden” several times.

Say they both went on a cooking show and Sanders used all the right ingredients for a chocolate cake while Biden used everything but the actual chocolate, which he substituted with dog shit. Then Bernie says “I made a chocolate cake while Biden didn’t”, only for MSNBC to come along and say “Well, Bernie says he’s the opposite of Biden, when our reporting shows that he used flour, so did Biden. He used eggs, so did Biden. He used frosting, so did Biden….”

You get the idea. JLP

Whenever the DNC screws up, Bernie gets burned…

~ jlpagano

SO glad I was able to get this vid online – I strayed over the 10 minute mark so Instagram wouldn’t take it!!! Might switch to YouTube completely in future…

UPDATE THURSDAY – below you’ll find a couple of sources which show I’m not alone in my opinion…(phew!)

As of 5 pm EST on Wednesday, Buttigieg and Sanders are tied with 11 delegates apiece. And declaring that the great centrist hope has won something is something that corporate media are clearly eager to do—even in an exceedingly close race in which, rather famously, not all the votes have been counted yet.

How Corporate Media Make Pete Look Like He’s Winning
Jim Naurekas – FAIR.org

What is meant by "People want to keep their healthcare plans" (video rant)

~ jlpagano

One thing I left out from the above rant was something that was pointed out by Bernie Sanders in a previous debate that’s worth noting…many of the ads during the breaks at these debates are FOR the health insurance companies, and they are specifically designed to malign Medicare For All. Slight conflict of interest for the likes of CNN, yes? JLP

And so the predictable corporate media takedown of Bernie Sanders begins…

~ jlpagano

We saw it with David Norris here in Ireland in 2011, when the Irish mainstream media took a letter of clemency the progressive candidate wrote 10 years previously as an excuse to associate his name with the word “pedophilia” on virtually a daily basis until he withdrew from the campaign.

It happened to Jeremy Corbyn from the moment he became the Leader of the Labour Party in 2015, with the tactics remaining more or less the same (although much of the attacks came from within his own party) although you can replace the word “pedophilia” with “Antisemitism” and it contributed greatly to an embarrassing election defeat last December

Now with Bernie Sanders showing himself to be leading the polls in Iowa, CNN is doing it to him, just a day before the last Democratic debate before the first caucus takes place.

The stakes were high when Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren met at Warren’s apartment in Washington, DC, one evening in December 2018. The longtime friends knew that they could soon be running against each other for president. The two agreed that if they ultimately faced each other as presidential candidates, they should remain civil and avoid attacking one another, so as not to hurt the progressive movement. They also discussed how to best take on President Donald Trump, and Warren laid out two main reasons she believed she would be a strong candidate: She could make a robust argument about the economy and earn broad support from female voters. Sanders responded that he did not believe a woman could win.

Bernie Sanders told Elizabeth Warren in private 2018 meeting that a woman can’t win, sources say
MJ Lee, CNN.com

The key words in the above quote are in the headline – “sources say”. To be fair to CNN, they at least tack them on, although being at the end, they could well be ignored. There is certainly nothing in the opening passage of the article itself to suggest that they are second (third? fourth?) hand reports of a private conversation.

As you can see, MJ Lee categorically states at the end of the quote : “Sanders responded that he did not believe a woman could win.”

They do include a response from Sanders himself, albeit halfway down the page :

“It’s sad that, three weeks before the Iowa caucus and a year after that private conversation, staff who weren’t in the room are lying about what happened. What I did say that night was that Donald Trump is a sexist, a racist and a liar who would weaponize whatever he could. Do I believe a woman can win in 2020? Of course! After all, Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by 3 million votes in 2016.”

They do walk it back slightly today, quoting Warren herself who claims : ‘I thought a woman could win; he disagreed‘. An important distinction, yes? That immediately throws into question how this exchange was interpreted. HOW did he show his disagreement, Senator Warren? Did he actually say “I disagree”? Did he actually say something along the lines of “I do not believe a woman can win”? Or, as I suspect, did he happen to be shaking his head right after you said “I think a woman can win”? That COULD suggest disagreement, but it could also suggest he was shaking his head while forming his thoughts. We don’t know.

Whatever the strategically planted attempts to be ‘fair’, there is no doubt that the overwhelming slant of these articles is that there is a suggestion that “misogynist” is to Sanders as “antisemite” supposedly was to Corbyn (you hear nothing about it now he has said he’s stepping down as leader) and “pedophile” supposedly was to Norris (he’s still a Senator!).

The Young Turks, who are Bernie backers, offer this take on the story :

All of this leads me to believe that Bernie shouldn’t be the nominee, but only because I fear that if that were the case, the US corporate media would then consider Trump the lesser of two “evils” and continue to give the president’s rhetoric infinite free air time much as they did in 2016.

Since I primarily want that orange moron out of the White House, and it seems that the Democrat darling is Joe Biden, I would probably be supportive although I reckon it would be a smart move to nominate Warren as his VP, while publicly promising to adopt some of the progressive platform in the first term as a sweetener.

I would be satisfied with such an arrangement, although my ideal choice would have to be Bernie. It’s just a shame that the only reason not to have a Progressive government is that the corporations wouldn’t be agreeable. Even if it’s not in my lifetime, I hope a day will come whereby their objections won’t matter. JLP

Hillary's so "Crooked" that Trump's own Dept of Justice can't find anything to "lock her up" for…

~ jlpagano

The U.S. Attorney who former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions tasked with investigating Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation and the Uranium One deal, and the FBI’s inquiry into Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state has reportedly found “nothing worth pursuing.”

DOJ Clinton Probe That Trump Desired Has Reportedly Found ‘Nothing Worth Pursuing’
Matt Naham – LawAndCrime.com

All the tweets calling her “Crooked Hillary”, all the rallies where he encouraged his followers to mindlessly chant “lock her up”, all the insinuations on Fox News…and it seems they have found nothing.

So when it was the Mueller investigation, it was the Democrats wasting taxpayers money for the #RussiaHoax. And nowadays we apparently have more taxpayers money wasted for the #ImpeachmentHoax.

So using that logic, that means that Trump has been wasting taxpayers money for what can only be called the #UraniumHoax???