Sanders called for abolishing the CIA

[Peter Lemkin]

Bernie Sanders has now won in New Hampshire, Vermont, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Colorado, Kansas and Nebraska, after defeating Clinton on Super Saturday. Sanders swept the caucuses in Kansas and Nebraska, while Clinton won Louisiana's primary.

That said, just as the Republican Party Powerful don't want Trump, the Democratic Party Powerful don't want Sanders. Both parties are wings of the same American Corporate, Banking, Intelligence, War-Making Covert Government - and want things generally status quo....window dressing allowed, as long as it stays window dressing.

The best thing to come out of this, and I'm even dubious of that, would be the destruction of the two party system and a real democratic multi-party system with proportional representation, instead of winner take all. Dream on. I think Amerika is dead and attempts at last minute resuscitation are too late barring a revolution which Americans are not up for in sufficient numbers.

[David Guyatt]

Bernie Sanders has now won in New Hampshire, Vermont, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Colorado, Kansas and Nebraska, after defeating Clinton on Super Saturday. Sanders swept the caucuses in Kansas and Nebraska, while Clinton won Louisiana's primary.

What will the elite do with Sanders if he becomes a serious threat to their candidates?

[Peter Lemkin]

Bernie Sanders has now won in New Hampshire, Vermont, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Colorado, Kansas and Nebraska, after defeating Clinton on Super Saturday. Sanders swept the caucuses in Kansas and Nebraska, while Clinton won Louisiana's primary.

What will the elite do with Sanders if he becomes a serious threat to their candidates?

Dirty tricks [scandals leaked to media]; sexual assassination attempt; then if they really can't remove him as Democratic candidate, he'd befall an 'accident' or 'heart attack' - or similar, IMHO.

They can't deal with someone even more off the 'script' than is Trump....and the media constantly brands him a 'Socialist' not a 'Democratic Socialist', as is common and mainstream in Europe [and true]. Socialism and Communism are synonyms in US-speak.

[Peter Lemkin]

Sanders has apparently won in Michigan, a very populous state [read many delegates]. Increasingly it seems Americans are voting for anyone who does NOT represent the machines in the two parties that are really wing of the single American party. It would be a very strange race were it Trump v. Sanders! At least there would be very CLEAR differences between the two candidates. However, the machines in both parties do NOT want either man, and are working hard now to see that neither gets their party's bid. This is a very strange race indeed....but not too surprising in some ways, as Americans have finally figured out that they are getting the short end of the stick...even if they haven't quite figured out who it is dishing out the beating to them - and why. They simply are voting 'NO' to politics as usual.

[Magda Hassan]

Increasingly it seems Americans are voting for anyone who does NOT represent the machines in the two parties that are really wing of the single American party.......

....This is a very strange race indeed....but not too surprising in some ways, as Americans have finally figured out that they are getting the short end of the stick...even if they haven't quite figured out who it is dishing out the beating to them - and why. They simply are voting 'NO' to politics as usual.

Yes, this is what it looks like to me too. Hilary is really on the nose with so may. Do they realise what she represents to so many? Apparently not. And that so may are prepare to give Trump a chance says a lot about the Republicans.

However, the machines in both parties do NOT want either man, and are working hard now to see that neither gets their party's bid.

This is going to be the thing to watch. Already the GOP are urging people to vote for Hilary. She is one of them after all.

I love watching the political owners when they see too much democracy about to happen. All the excuses they come up with. We have the same with our micro parties. These are springing up because of dissatisfaction with the big players so they increase the price of registering massively and complain about how big the ballot paper is and we can possibly have them so big. LOL

[Peter Lemkin]

Increasingly it seems Americans are voting for anyone who does NOT represent the machines in the two parties that are really wing of the single American party.......

....This is a very strange race indeed....but not too surprising in some ways, as Americans have finally figured out that they are getting the short end of the stick...even if they haven't quite figured out who it is dishing out the beating to them - and why. They simply are voting 'NO' to politics as usual.

Yes, this is what it looks like to me too. Hilary is really on the nose with so may. Do they realise what she represents to so many? Apparently not. And that so may are prepare to give Trump a chance says a lot about the Republicans.

However, the machines in both parties do NOT want either man, and are working hard now to see that neither gets their party's bid.

This is going to be the thing to watch. Already the GOP are urging people to vote for Hilary. She is one of them after all.

I love watching the political owners when they see too much democracy about to happen. All the excuses they come up with. We have the same with our micro parties. These are springing up because of dissatisfaction with the big players so they increase the price of registering massively and complain about how big the ballot paper is and we can possibly have them so big. LOL

The Big Political Bosses in both parties are now panicking, I think. They will start to pull out the dirty tricks now...not that is hasn't already begun. Oh, how I'd love to see a Democratic Socialist in the White House.....but I still can't see it being allowed. I don't know how to label Trump other than on most [not all] issues very negatively. [I like, for example, that he doesn't believe the official version of 911 nor that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were justified or desirable.] He is simply to simple, vulgar, uninformed and bigoted to do a good or even safe job as President [i.e., even less than the usual useful idiots that become President].

Maybe both parties will decide to cancel the election altogether and just declare a state of Emergency, evoke COG and appoint the government of 'choice' [their choice]. The American political system stopped working long ago [11/22/63 is a good date to look at for the big 'tip' toward control by the men behind the curtain]....but is certainly is now out of control and anything could happen now.....good and bad. IMHO.

[Peter Lemkin]

Two Corrupt Establishments

March 9, 2016

Exclusive: The insurgent campaigns of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have staggered Official Washington's twin corrupt establishments on the Republican and Democratic sides, but what happens next, asks Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
The United States is led by two corrupt establishments, one Democratic and one Republican, both deeply dependent on special-interest money, both sharing a similar perspective on world affairs, and both disdainful toward the American people who are treated as objects to be manipulated, not citizens to be respected.
There are, of course, differences. The Democrats are more liberal on social policy and favor a somewhat larger role of government in addressing the nation's domestic problems. The Republicans embrace Ronald Reagan's motto, "government is the problem," except when they want the government to intervene on "moral" issues such as gay marriage and abortion.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

But these two corrupt establishments are intertwined when it comes to important issues of trade, economics and foreign policy. Both are true believers in neo-liberal "free trade"; both coddle Wall Street (albeit seeking slightly different levels of regulation); and both favor interventionist foreign policies (only varying modestly in how the wars are sold to the public).
Because the two establishments have a chokehold on the mainstream media, they escape any meaningful accountability when they are wrong. Thus, their corruption is not just defined by the billions of special-interest dollars that they take in but in their deviations from the real world. The two establishments have created a fantasyland that all the Important People treat as real.
Which is why it has been somewhat amusing to watch establishment pundits pontificate about what must be done in their make-believe world stopping "Russian aggression," establishing "safe zones" in Syria, and fawning over noble "allies" like Saudi Arabia and Turkey while growing legions of Americans have begun to see through these transparent fictions.
Though the candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have many flaws, there is still something encouraging about Americans listening to some of straight talk from both Trump and Sanders and to watch the flailing reactions of their establishment rivals.
While it's true Trump has made comments that are offensive and stupid, he also has dished out some truths that the GOP establishment simply won't abide, such as noting President George W. Bush's failure to protect the country from the 9/11 attacks and Bush's deceptive case for invading Iraq. Trump's rivals were flummoxed by his audacity, sputtering about his apostasy, but rank-and-file Republicans were up to handling the truth.
Trump violated another Republican taboo when he advocated that the U.S. government take an evenhanded position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and even told pro-Israeli donors that they could not buy his support with donations. By contrast, other Republicans, such as Sen. Marco Rubio, were groveling for the handouts and advocating a U.S. foreign policy that could have been written by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Trump's Israel heresy brought the Republican foreign-policy elite, the likes of William Kristol and other neoconservatives, to full battle stations. Kristol's fellow co-founder of the neocon Project for the New American Century, Robert Kagan, was so apoplectic over Trump's progress toward the GOP nomination that he announced that he would vote for Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Clinton's Struggles
Clinton, however, has had her own struggles toward the nomination. Though her imposing war chest and machine-driven sense of inevitability scared off several potential big-name rivals, she has had her hands full with Sen. Bernie Sanders, a 74-year-old "democratic socialist" from Vermont. Sanders pulled off a stunning upset on Tuesday by narrowly winning Michigan.
While Sanders has largely finessed foreign policy issues beyond noting that he opposed the Iraq War and Clinton voted for it Sanders apparently found a winning issue in Michigan when he emphasized his rejection of trade deals while Clinton has mostly supported them. The same issue has worked well for Trump as he lambastes U.S. establishment leaders for negotiating bad deals.
What is notable about the "free trade" issue is that it has long been a consensus position of both the Republican and Democratic establishments. For years, anyone who questioned these deals was mocked as a know-nothing or a protectionist. All the smart money was on "free trade," a signature issue of both the Bushes and the Clintons, praised by editorialists from The Wall Street Journal through The New York Times.
The fact that "free trade" over the past two decades has become a major factor in hollowing out of the middle class, especially across the industrial heartland of Middle America, was of little concern to the financial and other elites concentrated on the coasts. At election time, those "loser" Americans could be kept in line with appeals to social issues and patriotism, even as many faced borderline poverty, growing heroin addiction rates and shorter life spans.
Despite that suffering, the twin Republican/Democratic establishments romped merrily along. The GOP elite called for evermore tax cuts to benefit the rich; demanded "reform" of Social Security and Medicare, meaning reductions in benefits; and proposed more military spending on more interventions overseas. The Democrats were only slightly less unrealistic, negotiating a new trade deal with Asia and seeking a new Cold War with Russia.
Early in Campaign 2016, the expectations were that Republican voters would again get behind an establishment candidate like former Florida Jeb Bush or Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, while the Democrats would get in line behind Hillary Clinton's coronation march.
TV pundits declared that there was no way that Donald Trump could win the GOP race, that his high early poll numbers would fade like a summer romance. Bernie Sanders was laughed at as a fringe "issue" candidate. But then something expected happened.
On the Republican side, blue-collar whites finally recognized how the GOP establishment had played them for suckers; they weren't going to take it anymore. On the Democratic side, young voters, in particular, recognized how they had been dealt an extremely bad hand, stuck with massive student debt and unappealing job prospects.
So, on the GOP side, disaffected blue-collar whites rallied to Trump's self-financed campaign and to his promises to renegotiate the trade deals and shut down illegal immigration; on the Democratic side, young voters joined Sanders's call for a "political revolution."
The two corrupt establishments were staggered. Yet, whether the populist anti-establishment insurrections can continue moving forward remains in doubt.
On the Democratic side, Clinton's candidacy appears to have been saved because African-American voters know her better than Sanders and associate her with President Barack Obama. They've given her key support, especially in Southern states, but the Michigan result suggests that Clinton may have to delay her long-expected "pivot to the center" a bit longer.
On the Republican side, Trump's brash style has driven many establishment favorites out of the race and has put Rubio on the ropes. If Rubio is knocked out and if Ohio Gov. John Kasich remains an also-ran then the establishment's only alternative would be Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a thoroughly disliked figure in the U.S. Senate. It's become increasingly plausible that Trump could win the Republican nomination.
What a Trump victory would mean for the Republican Party is hard to assess. Is it even possible for the GOP establishment with its laissez-faire orthodoxy of tax cuts for the rich and trickle-down economics for everyone else to reconcile with Trump's populist agenda of protecting Social Security and demanding revamped trade deals to restore American manufacturing?
Further, what would the neocons do? They now control the Republican Party's foreign policy apparatus, which is tied to unconditional support for Israel and interventionism against Israel's perceived enemies, from Syria's Bashar al-Assad, to Iran, to Vladimir Putin's Russia. Would they join Kagan in backing Hillary Clinton and trusting that she would be a reliable vessel for neocon desires?
And, if Clinton prevails against Sanders and does become the neocon "vessel," where might the growing ranks of Democratic and Independent non-interventionists go? Will some side with Trump despite his ugly remarks about Mexicans and Muslims? Or will they reject both major parties, either voting for a third party or staying home?
Whatever happens, Official Washington's twin corrupt establishments have been dealt an unexpected and potentially lasting punch.

[Peter Lemkin]

[TABLE="width: 100%"]
[TR]
[TD="width: 84%"]

The Suspect Massachusetts 2016 Primary

By Theodore Soares
[/TD]
[TD="width: 16%"][/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]

Inthe Massachusetts March 1, 2016 primary Democratic Party race, thecomputerized vote count declared candidate Clinton the winner but theexit polls indicated candidate Sanders to be the winner by a marginof 6.6%. These same exit polls accurately predicted the results ofeach and all of the Republican candidates. Until the US joins a longlist of many other countries that protect the integrity of theirelections through publicly observed hand counting of paper ballots,our elections are liable to be suspect.
Exitpolling has been performed in the US and other countries for decadesand the science and proper methodology is well established to obtainan accurate prediction of the final vote. For years, manyresearchers have pointed to the discrepancies between exit pollresults and the unverified computer counts in US elections. The mainresponse by the defenders of computerized voting, while expressingblind faith in the unverified computer counting, has been to claimthat the exit polls may go wrong because respondents, moreenthusiastic for a particular candidate, would be more likely toagree to be polled. The recent Massachusetts Super Tuesday primariesdid not support this theory.

(image by Ted Soares)

[1]Exit polls published by CNN immediately after close of polls.
[2]Reported computer vote count from www.nytimes.com/elections/results. 100% vote count. Exit poll projected winner is highlightedin green. Reported winner for the state is highlighted in yellow.
[3]Discrepancies are the reported vote count percentage less exit pollpercentage. Negative result indicates lower vote count thanpredicted by the exit polls. Positive result indicates higher votecount than predicted by the exit polls. In contrast to the lowdiscrepancy in the Republican Party race, the discrepancy for theDemocratic Party race is much greater than the exit poll margin oferror of 5.4% (95% confidence level) for the difference between thetwo candidates.
[4]Margin of error for differences (at 95% CI) calculated according to: Franklin, C .The'Margin of Error' for Differences in Polls .University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin. October 2002, revisedFebruary 2007.
TheRepublican Party primary race has been widely acknowledged as morepolarized and contentious than the Democratic Party primary race. Inthe current election cycle, many Republican Party voters demonstrateenthusiasm for candidate Trump as many Democratic Party votersdemonstrate enthusiasm for candidate Sanders. Yet, the exit pollresults for the Republican Party closely matched the final computervote count for every candidate. This accuracy was obtained withabout 500 fewer respondents than for the Democratic Party. Thehigher number of respondents in the Democratic race should lead to asmaller margin of error. The same exit poll for the Democratic race,however, conducted at the same time and the same places, differedwidely from the final computer count and the margin of error for theexit poll. This difference turned a Sanders' victory into a defeat.
InUS elections, very few precincts conduct verified hand counts ofpaper ballots. Almost all ballots are counted by computer softwarehidden from human eyes. A few years ago, MIT Technology Reviewpublished the article Howto Hack an Election in One Minute reporting on Princeton University's research project SecurityAnalysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine finding how easy it was to hack into a computer voting system tochange the results of an election while remaining totallyundetectable. The BrennanCenter for Justice at NYU School of Law in their report TheMachinery of Democracy: Protecting Elections in an Electronic World found "more than 120 potential threats to [computerized] votingsystems."
Dueto such concerns, to insure the integrity of public elections,Germany reverted to publicly observed hand counting of paper ballotsfor all their elections. In 2006 the FederalConstitutional Court of Germany determined that while vote fraudwith hand-counted ballots would be easy to detect, "programmingerrors in the software or deliberate electoral fraud committed bymanipulating the software of electronic voting machines can berecognized only with difficulty. The very wide-reaching effect ofpossible errors of the voting machines or of deliberate electoralfraud make special precautions necessary in order to safeguard theprinciple of the public nature of elections."
Noamount of testing and certifying procedures for the machine countingof votes or the availability of paper trails, post election audits,or recounts could satisfy Germany's constitutional requirement thatall important aspects of the electoral process be publicly observableand that "[t]he voters themselves must be able to understandwithout detailed knowledge of computer technology whether their votescast are recorded in an unadulterated manner."
Germanyis not alone among technologically advanced nations that rejectcomputerized counting in their elections. Countries such as Canada,France, Ireland, Italy, Denmark, Finland and 53other countries protect the integrity of their elections withhand-counted paper ballots.
Asthe Massachusetts primaries indicate, the integrity of our electionswill be always questionable and suspect until we join the many othercountries that safeguard their elections with publicly observed handcounting of paper ballots.

[David Guyatt]

[TABLE="width: 100%"]
[TR]
[TD="width: 84%"]The Suspect Massachusetts 2016 Primary

By Theodore Soares [/TD]
[TD="width: 16%"][/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]

Inthe Massachusetts March 1, 2016 primary Democratic Party race, thecomputerized vote count declared candidate Clinton the winner but theexit polls indicated candidate Sanders to be the winner by a marginof 6.6%. These same exit polls accurately predicted the results ofeach and all of the Republican candidates. Until the US joins a longlist of many other countries that protect the integrity of theirelections through publicly observed hand counting of paper ballots,our elections are liable to be suspect.
Exitpolling has been performed in the US and other countries for decadesand the science and proper methodology is well established to obtainan accurate prediction of the final vote. For years, manyresearchers have pointed to the discrepancies between exit pollresults and the unverified computer counts in US elections. The mainresponse by the defenders of computerized voting, while expressingblind faith in the unverified computer counting, has been to claimthat the exit polls may go wrong because respondents, moreenthusiastic for a particular candidate, would be more likely toagree to be polled. The recent Massachusetts Super Tuesday primariesdid not support this theory.

(image by Ted Soares)

[1]Exit polls published by CNN immediately after close of polls.
[2]Reported computer vote count from www.nytimes.com/elections/results. 100% vote count. Exit poll projected winner is highlightedin green. Reported winner for the state is highlighted in yellow.
[3]Discrepancies are the reported vote count percentage less exit pollpercentage. Negative result indicates lower vote count thanpredicted by the exit polls. Positive result indicates higher votecount than predicted by the exit polls. In contrast to the lowdiscrepancy in the Republican Party race, the discrepancy for theDemocratic Party race is much greater than the exit poll margin oferror of 5.4% (95% confidence level) for the difference between thetwo candidates.
[4]Margin of error for differences (at 95% CI) calculated according to: Franklin, C .The'Margin of Error' for Differences in Polls .University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin. October 2002, revisedFebruary 2007.
TheRepublican Party primary race has been widely acknowledged as morepolarized and contentious than the Democratic Party primary race. Inthe current election cycle, many Republican Party voters demonstrateenthusiasm for candidate Trump as many Democratic Party votersdemonstrate enthusiasm for candidate Sanders. Yet, the exit pollresults for the Republican Party closely matched the final computervote count for every candidate. This accuracy was obtained withabout 500 fewer respondents than for the Democratic Party. Thehigher number of respondents in the Democratic race should lead to asmaller margin of error. The same exit poll for the Democratic race,however, conducted at the same time and the same places, differedwidely from the final computer count and the margin of error for theexit poll. This difference turned a Sanders' victory into a defeat.
InUS elections, very few precincts conduct verified hand counts ofpaper ballots. Almost all ballots are counted by computer softwarehidden from human eyes. A few years ago, MIT Technology Reviewpublished the article Howto Hack an Election in One Minute reporting on Princeton University's research project SecurityAnalysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine finding how easy it was to hack into a computer voting system tochange the results of an election while remaining totallyundetectable. The BrennanCenter for Justice at NYU School of Law in their report TheMachinery of Democracy: Protecting Elections in an Electronic World found "more than 120 potential threats to [computerized] votingsystems."
Dueto such concerns, to insure the integrity of public elections,Germany reverted to publicly observed hand counting of paper ballotsfor all their elections. In 2006 the FederalConstitutional Court of Germany determined that while vote fraudwith hand-counted ballots would be easy to detect, "programmingerrors in the software or deliberate electoral fraud committed bymanipulating the software of electronic voting machines can berecognized only with difficulty. The very wide-reaching effect ofpossible errors of the voting machines or of deliberate electoralfraud make special precautions necessary in order to safeguard theprinciple of the public nature of elections."
Noamount of testing and certifying procedures for the machine countingof votes or the availability of paper trails, post election audits,or recounts could satisfy Germany's constitutional requirement thatall important aspects of the electoral process be publicly observableand that "[t]he voters themselves must be able to understandwithout detailed knowledge of computer technology whether their votescast are recorded in an unadulterated manner."
Germanyis not alone among technologically advanced nations that rejectcomputerized counting in their elections. Countries such as Canada,France, Ireland, Italy, Denmark, Finland and 53other countries protect the integrity of their elections withhand-counted paper ballots.
Asthe Massachusetts primaries indicate, the integrity of our electionswill be always questionable and suspect until we join the many othercountries that safeguard their elections with publicly observed handcounting of paper ballots.

I've been expecting this, or something like this, because the Neocons won't let popularity interfere with their ambitions and dogma. But what is interesting, even encouraging - and obviously important - is that more and more Americans are waking up to the reality of how things operate in politics. They need to learn to become more cynical still.

[Tracy Riddle]

Hillary is Hubert Humphrey, Trump is George Wallace, Bernie is Eugene McCarthy, Ted Cruz is Nixon. But there is no Bobby Kennedy this year. [URL="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/1968-2016-election-parallels_us_56e5fb49e4b0b25c91824dce"]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/1968...5c91824dce[/URL]

WASHINGTON -- It was the spring of a presidential election year, but there was no sense of hope and renewal in the land.
Instead, the United States was in the grip of tribalism and seething fear. Voters were energized by anger and resentment. The media ran red with violent language; surging crowds, cops and protesters filled city streets.
The main candidates were: a shopworn Democratic front-runner who embodied the party establishment; a white-haired, professorial anti-war protest candidate beloved by college students; a disruptive, race-baiting outsider with a knack for drawing press attention; and an unctuous, beady-eyed Republican lawyer practicing dirty tricks.
At its nominating convention in a Midwestern city that summer, one of the two political parties was torn apart, both inside the hall and out, as protestors clashed with police, who, it was later determined, were the instigators of the riots.
The general election hinged on which party could woo the most votes of a white working class that had been energized in the first place by the outsider candidate, who had railed against a powerful "Them" against "Us."
That was 1968, not 2016.