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Probably the saddest thing about Hillary’s 2016 run, and all the cheating she did to keep Bernie from winning, is the rift it caused in the Democratic Party and all the people she dragged down with her: most notably her husband and Barack Obama.
When Clinton was president, I quite liked him and thought he was getting a ridiculous amount of criticism from Republicans for no good reason. I didn’t care then if he wanted to get a blow job in the oval office, and I don’t really care now. Kennedy probably did the same. Hell, who knows how many presidents have done the same. We have no proof at all that J.K. Polk or Millard Fillmore did not. Now, it seems that he was working against the left all along and the likely reason he put his wife in charge of Health Care was because he knew she could never get it done.
I never believed it when people said that Vince Foster was not a suicide and Ron Brown’s plane crash was not accidental. Since then the list of mysterious deaths has grown so long it cannot possibly be a coincidence.
I used to like Obama, and voted for him twice, but his most recent attack on Bernie Sanders just shreds any credibility he had left as a liberal, which wasn’t much.
I wish that I didn’t feel such antagonism to people who sort of, kind of, once upon a time seemed to be on the same side. But I do, and they were not.
Maybe it’s a tragic ripple effect of Hillary’s candidacy, but maybe it’s a good thing. The rupture had to eventually come, in order to clear the air, and now it has.

There are many advantages to free college. It would reduce unemployment since a high percentage of people 18-22 would be in school, and working part-time jobs at most. It might reduce crime a bit, too, by the same logic. It would certainly make a big difference to a lot of people’s lives, and that’s a good thing.
The biggest advantage to it, though, and the reason it makes perfect sense to pay for it with tax dollars, is that it will benefit society as a whole. Trade schools are included in Bernie’s plan, so within a few years of implementation, a lot of people will be graduating with mad skills in plumbing, automobile repair, electronics, and so forth. That will make it a lot easier to get things done, and done well.
It will also increase the raw number of physicists, mathematicians, doctors, botanist, chemists, engineers and architects. That increases the field of people who have a realistic chance of finding a cure for cancer, designing buildings which are comfortable to live and work in and have a negative carbon footprint, perfecting robots who can do all the work, synthesize chemicals which can raise everybody’s IQ by 10 points, and inventing a practical flying car.
It may cost a bit to transition to the system, and Bernie has explained how to pay for it, but it will bring much more money into the economy in the end.

Once upon a time, candidates careers were destroyed over much less. Muskie’s wayward tear, Howard Dean’s scream, Biden’s plagiarized speech, Dukakis being photographed in a tank and looking like a total dork. But, now we are in the Trump era, so I don’t know.
Our current story takes place in South Carolina. It’s the first of the primary states with a large black population, and Buttigieg is not the most popular person in the world with black people. In fact, as mayor of South Bend, he’s been precisely on the wrong side of the whole Black Lives Matter movement.
So, I guess he felt he needed to do something, so he came up with “The Douglass Plan.” Now, I’ve only scanned the table of contents. It looks like he says some nice things about education and prison reform, but it seems a lot of the money is going into grants for black entrepreneurs. Not exactly horrible, but it seems very much like an Andrew Yang solution to a problem that’s more complicated than that. That said, my problem is not with the plan itself.
It’s not even with the fact that the illustration accompanying the plan is a stock photo – a bit tacky for a major campaign, but hardly criminal. The picture is of a black woman squatting down to talk at face level with a black child – a nice photo. Which was shot in Kenya. I don’t know why they couldn’t have taken a photo of some black people in South Carolina but, again, that is not the problem.
The problem is that Buttigieg reported that 400 prominent South Carolinians had endorsed the plan, which kind of implies that they endorse Buttigieg.
Of the three most prominent black people on the list, two politicians and a minister, one said that she thinks the issues in the plan need to be discussed but that doesn’t mean she’s voting for Buttigieg, and the other two said something more along the lines of “WTF? I didn’t put my name down for this shit.”
It gets worse. Half the names on the list were white people, some were not South Carolina residents, a few names appeared on the list twice, and several couldn’t be located at all so may just have been made up names.
Apparently, the campaign sent out an e-mail to a bunch of people and said “If you don’t want to endorse this plan, please let us know before 4 p.m.” So, people who didn’t read the plan at all, or just glanced and then ignored it, had their names on the list.
The main thing for me, the reason I think this should end his campaign, is not so much the cheating aspect of it. It’s the ‘how stupid does he have to be to think he could get away with this’ aspect of it. This was a public, online thing. Did he think people wouldn’t notice that their names were on his list? Does he understand how the internet works?

How will the blue no matter who people react when Bernie is nominated? They will be split, obviously. Groups are always split when a new factor is introduced. It’s true in nature. When there’s a boulder in the stream, there are suddenly two streams. So it is with people.
The question is, where is the fault line and how big is the split? Here is my prediction: the rank and file centrists, the people who enthusiastically voted for Hillary and still blame Bernie somewhat for causing her defeat will be angry, and bitter, but they will come around because they are regular human beings who want the best world possible for themselves, their children, their country and the world.
The people who actually control the Democratic party may pay lip service, because you don’t actually come out against your party’s nominee traditionally (a few Democrats, like Manchin, may actually defect) but they will secretly be rooting for Trump. They have huge amounts of money and don’t want to pay taxes. (Pelosi and Schumer are in this category)
The media will continue to be anti-Bernie. I wouldn’t expect Rachel Maddow, or Trevor Noah to actually support Trump, but the basic media bias will still be there. The major networks, and the big newspapers, will continue to ignore Bernie’s large and enthusiastic rallies, and will gladly talk about Trump constantly.
But as long as we keep focusing on his policies, with which a huge majority of the American people agree, he will win.

I went to a lovely poetry reading last night, after a pretty good one the night before because they never co-ordinate these things. But it’s the one last night I want to write about.
It was at the relatively newly re-opened A Maze in Tchaiovna, and it was my first time at this location. It’s a short walk from Dejvicka Metro Station, on Kafkova St., which I find weirdly appropriate. I doubt they chose the location based on the street name, but it’s very cool.
It’s bigger, and even more complex than the last place. On my first futile attempt to find the poetry reading, before going back upstairs to the bar to ask directions, I passed many isolated rooms where people were playing chess, or cards, or just hanging out.
When I found the performance area, which is maybe a bit bigger than the last performance area, but similar. Some tables and chairs, lots of loose chairs, and a corner of couches. The stage is nice and large, and no microphone was needed. It was completely sealed off from outside noise. Perfect.
The thing that struck me right off the bat was that I didn’t know anybody there. Like I said, there’s no co-ordination between these events. I may have seen a couple of them at different poetry events, and talked to a few before the night was through, and one girl came in later who I’d met at the poetry reading last night, but essentially, it was a crowd of random strangers, so I had no idea what to expect when I got up on stage to do my “I’ll Vote Blue No Matter Who just as long as it’s Bernie” song. Well, the reaction was great, everything I could have hoped for. People were clapping along, giving callback to the lines, and I was loving it. It’s like wherever you go, all you have to do is mention Bernie Sanders and all of a sudden you’ve got a mini Bernie Sanders rally on your hands.