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Showing posts from January, 2020

The Enemy of My Goals Is My Friend?

If you were shocked by the sudden flare up of soap opera drama from the Warren campaign over the weekend leading up to the January Democratic debate, then her PR campaign had been working. It started with an article in Politico from Alex Thompson and Hollie Otterbein. The writers obtained what they said was a new script for volunteers that contrasted Sanders with Warren by pointing to the relative economic comfort of her base. This was portrayed as attacking Warren. There are a few problems with this. It's factual and matches reporting from Otterbein in July . The Sanders campaign denied sharing the awkwardly worded script. Many volunteers made the point that it was the opposite of the campaign messaging, which doesn't mention other candidates. One volunteer tweeted that it had been shared in a Slack channel by a volunteer posting for the first time and it was removed by a team leader. It should be noted that Otterbein and Thompson are embedded with the Warren campaign

For Whom the Libs Troll

Two articles published online within days of each other in December highlight in very different ways a unique hazard of our current political discourse that is singularly directed at the supporters and campaign of Bernie Sanders. Published by The Federalist, Melissa Longam Braunstein attempts to bring the accusations of anti-semitism thrown at Jeremy Corbyn specifically, and the British left in general to our domestic politics. Recognizing it ill-advised to accuse a Jewish man who lost family in the Holocaust of anti-semitism, in her piece  Linda Sarsour is Too Anti-Semitic For the Women’s March, But Not For Bernie Sanders  Braunstein attempts to implicate him through association. In her final paragraph she writes: These associations paint a pattern of proximity to antisemitism that’s hard to miss. That raises the thorny question: Is it that Sanders really doesn’t notice, that he’s willing to tolerate it, or that he somehow also supports it? Because there’s no doubt that by

Confessions of a Polling Truther

Do we have to spend the entire election season acting like it’s tin foil hat material to suggest that billion dollar corporations might manipulate publicly available data to protect their profits like fossil fuel companies with climate change, or big tobacco with cancer? — little jon quijote (@brotherbeat)  September 26, 2019 ***** In a  Los Angeles Times survey  of Bernie Sanders’ 2016 donors they found that the single largest group were those without a job. In September, as his campaign reached the million donor mark, 5 months earlier than in the 2016 cycle, we got a glimpse into Bernie’s current support.  Pew Research  released the results of its poll of Democratic voters which included the following graphic detailing the supporters of the major candidates Open Secrets  also released an interactive graphic that allows tracking of donors by profession. The professions with the strongest support for Bernie are teachers, nurses, farmers, truck drivers, and food s