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Admittedly, I’m already a Bernie fan so my world view is a bit skewed. I see all the huge crowds for Bernie, in whatever state he happens to be, and I see how many people love him and want to pose for selfies with him, and of course I read all the wonderful, glowing things people write about him.
Perhaps Biden’s and Warren’s supporters are seeing the same thing with their candidates but I doubt it’s quite the same feeling. Biden never gets much more than polite applause, from what I’ve seen.
I remember one time, though, I saw a video and thought “Damn, that’s a popularity level that no politician has, that’s movie star status.” It was an outdoor rock festival and Bernie wasn’t even a scheduled speaker, he just sort of showed up, and as he was walking across the lawn a wave of people was rushing after him, like “That’s Bernie Sanders! That’s Bernie Sanders!” and everybody there was absolutely thrilled.
It was a crowd of random voters. They were there for the music, not for one particular candidate. Yet, Bernie drew the love.
I felt sort of the same watching this. The guy interviewed was a punk teenager who had been interviewed by Bernie Sanders in a Burlington mall, as part of Mayor Sanders’ TV program “Bernie Speaks: the Mayor’s Show,” back in the ’80s.
The funny part was, he’d totally forgotten it, because it wasn’t exactly network TV, it was more like the 80s version of a podcast, and he was only the mayor, not a hugely famous person.
So, he is just a random voter. Yet, when asked if he was a Bernie supporter, he said of course he was, like why would there even be any question about it.
Bernie is hugely popular, whatever the media says, whatever the lying polls say. He is America’s favorite politician. He was a large base of wildly enthusiastic supporters, and even a lot of people who disagree with his views see him as an amiable and honest person.
The Democrats would have to be suicidal not to nominate him by acclimation. The scary part is, that is exactly what the DNC appears to be.

Sometimes I can’t help myself. My brother-in-law constantly posts gun nut memes and sometimes I point out the obvious stupidity of them, although I should know better. He’s almost the only one who ever posts that stuff on my page.
A week or so ago, a woman on my page complained that an airline had refused to seat her in first class, (which she was entitled to, it was a question of changing from one airline to another) and she was forced to suffer the long flight in coach, in spite of her bad back. I wrote back something along the lines of “Coach is not so bad, you won’t die” and was immediately swarmed by people saying what a rude and insensitive monster I was.
Just two minutes ago, I left a comment on somebody’s post complaining about the high price of parking on a university campus lot. I suggested they get a bicycle and I am braced for the nasty comments which are probably being angrily typed and directed my way at this very moment.
But, that is the way I feel about cars in general. People complain about other drivers, too slow in the fast lane, don’t use turn signals, park badly, etc…, they complain about the roads, they complain about the police, they complain, they complain, they complain. But all of their complaints, and a good deal of their expenses, would go away if they just didn’t own a car.
Admittedly, in today’s society, that’s kind of hard to pull off. We need better public transportation, both in cities and between cities. High speed trains, electric buses. We need bike trails all over the place. And people need to walk more.
I know a lot of people have cars, and a lot of people love cars. Fine. I don’t want to hear about your problems, though. They are self-inflicted.

(Disclaimer: At my wife’s insistence, we do have a family car. I try to limit its use, as we live in a city with excellent public transportation, but I’m often outvoted)

Yes, it is Bernie Sanders birthday and he is very old, except that doesn’t matter because he’s in super good shape and plays baseball and basketball, none of that weenie golf shit because he’s a working class guy.
Since it’s his birthday, I don’t want to go into the whole screed in detail, about saving the environment and giving everybody health care and making colleges free and getting money out of politics and legalizing marijuana and ending private prisons and all that other good stuff.
Those are reasons to vote for him but since it’s his birthday I wanted to tell you why I like him as much as I do, why millions of us are so vocal on his behalf that we seem, to an outsider, to be a cult.
For years I bought the propaganda about how the U.S. was just a right wing society, had a completely different mindset than people in places like Europe, and Australia. I’d pretty much given up hope of ever getting anybody elected who was to the left of Obama or Clinton, both of whom I supported at the time and both of whom were big disappointments.
Then along came Bernie. Suddenly I realized that there were millions of people who agreed with me that rich people should pay taxes, that we should end homelessness and poverty by giving everybody jobs repairing the environment, that universal health care was just the normally decent way to run a health care system.
Bernie Sanders made me realize that I am not alone, that there are many millions of other people who want the same things. That, in fact, we are the majority.

I just saw the headline “Republican Something-or-Other Say Government is Covering Up UFOs.” I didn’t bother reading the article because I doubted that it would contain any new information. Just some guy saying the government is lying to us and the only thing that makes that newsworthy is that he is a Republican, i.e. usually working on the side of the people who are lying to us most.
When it comes to UFOs, the government might be lying to us. Or they might not. Most serious scientists say there’s no solid proof that extraterrestrial beings have ever visited the Earth, but maybe they’re not getting all the info, either.
I suspect the government is lying to us damned near all the time. They concealed information about global warming for a generation, they have been lying to the public about marijuana since the 1930s, and they have lied to us about war after war after war, going all the way back to 1812, and I am certainly convinced they lied about 9/11. The government lies. The government conceals stuff.
I can’t see the motivation, though, in this case. It seems to me that if ‘the government’ (in quote marks because I’m mostly talking about the U.S. government, but they are not alone. There is little doubt the Czech government lies, and conceals stuff. Or the Chinese. Or the Israelis.) knew about the existence of extraterrestrials, they would put that news on blast. What a great enemy! What a great excuse to consolidate their power! People would be terrified and perfectly willing to accept curfews, random inspections, armed soldiers on all the rooftops – everything those in government want. Because people in government almost always want more government.

What Whoopi Goldberg said to Bernie Sanders, when he appeared the other day on “The View” was so gob-smackingly ignorant that it is worthy of note.
I do not recall the exact words, but it was something along the lines of “When Andrew Yang was here he explained that if we only could get the large corporations to pay their taxes, some of that money would trickle down to us and everybody would have all the money they need. It made perfect sense to me. Why don’t you talk about stuff like that.”
She obviously has not been paying attention to Bernie Sanders for this whole election cycle, or the last election cycle, or ever in fact because Bernie Sanders has been saying precisely that, again and again and again, since before Andrew Yang was even born.
Can’t really hold it against Whoopi, though. I liked her as Guinan in Star Trek, the next generation. I’ve liked her in some of the movies I’ve seen her in, even though they tend to be excessively dumb movies. She generally plays a nice person and, in fact, she might be. You can’t expect the ladies on the view to be political experts. That’s not the show’s format. The idea is to have a panel of minor female celebrities who are not experts at politics but are free to express their political opinions. It’s like expecting professional athletes to be political experts.
They have some money. They have some fame. But they are just as ignorant as the average American. There are a lot of people out there looking at Yang’s message and ready to jump right past Bernie. There are a lot of people who are impressed with all the programs Warren is putting out, without noticing that these were Bernie’s programs first.
Despite the fact that all of Bernie’s positions are online, despite the fact that he speaks to thousands of people every day, and despite the fact that he always says the same things, which he gets criticized for as if a politician is suppose to come up with new and jazzier positions every day, a lot of people are probably just as ignorant of his positions as Whoopi Goldberg is.
I blame the media.