Take 8 minutes and watch Senator Bernie Sanders explain on NBC’s “Meet the Press” what is happening to his movement now and what comes next.
Archives for category: Clinton
Kevin Drum writes here in Mother Jones about the celebrated Hillary Clinton emails.
Unlike most of us, he actually read the full report.
He identifies the most interesting of the emails. One of them is an email to Colin Powell on her second day in office as Secretary of State, where she asks him about using his personal email for State Department business. He responds and warns her to be careful and not to talk about it.
Page 11: On January 23, 2009, Clinton contacted former Secretary of State Colin Powell via e-mail to inquire about his use of a BlackBerry while he was Secretary of State (January 2001 to January 2005). In his e-mail reply, Powell warned Clinton that if it became “public” that Clinton had a BlackBerry, and she used it to “do business,” her e-mails could become “official record[s] and subject to the law.” Powell further advised Clinton, “Be very careful. I got around it all by not saying much and not using systems that captured the data.”
[Drum writes:] This is important. First, it makes clear that Hillary conversed with Colin Powell two days after becoming Secretary of State, not “a year later,” as Powell has claimed. Second, Powell essentially told her that he had just gone ahead and broken the law by “not using systems that captured the data.” Hillary, by contrast, chose instead to retain everything as the law required.
Drum concludes there is nothing in the report to warrant the wild claims made by Trump and the rightwing talkshow hosts.
On Sunday, I attended a fund-raising event for Hillary Clinton.
I have met her on several occasions in the past, beginning in 1984, when I stayed overnight at the Governor’s mansion in Little Rock while visiting the state to give a lecture. Although she has met many tens or hundreds of thousands of people over the years, she always remembers me (as does Bill).
I had a few minutes to talk to her privately. I gave her my “elevator speech” about the disaster of the privatization and testing policies of the past 15 years, and the need for a revival of support for public schools.
If you look at the photos, you will see the progression of our meeting. She recognizes me; we hug; I give her my views. And then the great shot, all taken from my cell phone by one of her staff.
After she did the meet and greet, she spoke for about 25 minutes to the 50 or so people there.
She spoke about the importance of working across party lines to get important work done that benefits all Americans. She talked about building better relationships with our allies. She said that she would work closely with Senator Sanders to develop a realistic plan to make college tuition-free for those below a certain income level and to reduce the cost of public college overall. She spoke of the need to elect Democrats to the Senate and the House and to reverse the Citizens United decision. She spoke of defeating the gun lobby, which represents not gun owners but gun manufacturers. She was especially eloquent on the subject of guns. She said that hunters should keep their guns; collectors should keep their guns. But there should be careful screening of all gun purchasers. The fact that Congress refuses to ban sales of guns to people on the terrorist watch list is madness. When asked what she would do about the millions of guns already in circulation, she said she was not sure, but would look into the gun buyback program that Australia used. She spoke eloquently about protecting and bettering the lives of all Americans.
She is knowledgable. She is experienced. She speaks with wisdom, judgment, and clarity. She has the stamina of a person of 30 (this was her fourth event of the day, and she never sat down, not once. And she had two more similar events to go that day.) Don’t believe the Trump nonsense about her health. She looked and sounded great. She is informed, and she is ready.
#Iamwithher
Michael Hansen of the Brookings Institution lists the five questions he thinks that the candidates should be asked about education. They are not the questions I would ask. (Hansen, by the way, has defended VAM, pooh-poohed parent concerns about overtesting, and defended the effectiveness of Teach for America.)
They are not bad questions (what kind of person would you choose for Secretary of Education? how can Title I be improved? Have the Obama administration policies for higher education helped students? Which federal education programs would you expand, which would you shrink? How much would you increase funding for education research?). I actually would like to see these questions asked, since I am willing to bet that Donald Trump has no idea what Title I is, what No Child Behind was, what the Obama administration policies in higher education are, or which federal education programs are worth expanding or eliminating. He is for charters. He is against Common Core. Other than that, there is no indication that he knows anything about education issues.
Here are questions I would ask:
1. Do you think the federal government should continue to support the privatization of public education? Does the federal government have a role in strengthening and protecting public schools that have democratic governance?
2. Would you expand or shrink the funds now dedicated to privately managed charter schools?
3. What is your view of vouchers that allow public dollars to be spent in religious schools?
4. How would you define the federal role in education?
5. What do you see as the federal role in increasing equitable resources among districts and schools?
6. Would you be willing to persuade Congress to reduce the burden of standardized testing? Specifically, how would you change the federal law to ease the federal pressure to test students annually, a practice unknown in high-performing countries?
7. Do you think that every child should be instructed by a professionally prepared and certified teacher? How can the federal government verify that states are hiring fully qualified teachers?
I am sure you have many more good questions. Please suggest them.
Ruth Conniff, editor-in-chief of The Progressive, was a passionate Bernie supporter. She attended the Democratic National Convention and was mostly disgusted by the proceedings.
Here is her report on the uneasy truce between the Clinton and Sanders forces.
She writes:
The purest expression of Clinton’s philosophy came when she described how she remembered her own mother, who was cruelly abandoned by her parents at a young age, and how she was reminded of her mother’s story when she met a little girl in Arkansas who sat on the porch all day in a wheelchair, desperately yearning to go to school. Clinton set about fighting for the rights of disabled children to get the same access to public education as their non-disabled peers.
“Simply caring is not enough,” Clinton stated, in what could be her credo. “To drive real change you have to understand both hearts and laws,”
“It’s a big idea, isn’t it?” She continued. “All children with disabilities deserve to go to school . . . How do you make it happen?” Answer: getting heavily involved in policy details.
This is Clinton’s core belief: Life is tough. You want to make things better? Don’t complain, get in the fray, fight, engage, compromise, persevere.
The Bernie delegates, God bless them, are not quite ready for Hillary or the pragmatic, compromising realpolitik she represents. And you can hardly blame them for feeling whipsawed by their experience at the Democratic convention.
On Thursday night, no sooner had the great Reverend William Barber finished his sermon, calling on everyone present to join together to revive the heart of America, and walking off stage to thunderous applause, than General John Allen and his military retinue marched in to declare: “America is the Greatest Nation on Earth.” General Allen endorsed U.S. military ventures around the globe. “We will oppose and resist tyranny and we will defeat evil,” he declared.
The Sanders campaign has already achieved a lot, she writes.
To win, Hillary Clinton needs the Sanders voters. And she knows it.
“Bernie Sanders and I will work together to make college tuition free,” Hillary declared in her address. “We will also liberate millions of people who already have student debt.”
The interesting question now is not whether Bernie Sanders voters will hold their noses and vote for Hillary. Most will.
The more interesting question is whether they will stick it out and stay involved in electoral politics.
“We all know that Donald Trump is a racist demagogue,” said Peter Rickman, a Bernie delegate from Wisconsin and the Working Families Party co-chair in the state….
If enough Bernie people are willing to work within the party, with the suits and the hacks and the phonies they detest, long enough and hard enough to take over the Democratic Party and force it to fulfill its progressive ideals, they could transform American politics.
And when they do, their movements against fracking and destructive trade deals and an end to U.S. military aggression abroad will be edited together with the heroes of the other great social movements of history into a sappy video montage at a future Democratic national convention.
Susan Ochshorn is an advocate for early childhood education and a deep-blue progressive.
In this article, she explores how she reacts to Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.
In her own decision-making, Ochshorn ordered a copy of Hillary’s book It Takes a Village. She liked what she read.
She writes:
The book is a love letter to America’s children. At Yale, Clinton had gotten permission to study child development, adding a year to her legal studies. She wondered about the kids she saw in New Haven, worrying about their journeys to adulthood. She reveled in Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, which transformed our attitudes about human ability and potential.
Clinton also weighed in on the nascent findings of neuroscience. Long before adverse childhood experiences entered the lexicon, and @acestoohigh became a Twitter handle, she understood the impact of toxic stress. “Some communities are so besieged by issues of survival that children’s needs get pushed aside,” she wrote. We get a glimpse of the young social justice warrior, side-by-side with Marian Wright Edelman at the Children’s Defense Fund.
Her framework is pure Urie Bronfenbrenner. A child psychologist, he emigrated from Russia in 1923, making his way to Ithaca, New York, and a distinguished career at Cornell. This scientist understood the need for interdependence; he knew that children, and their parents, don’t develop in isolation. First and foremost, he believed, every child needs at least one adult who is irrationally crazy about him or her—the core of his elegant bio-ecological theory, which undergirds America’s bare-bones social policy, including Head Start, which he helped to design, community schools, and Promise Neighborhoods.
It Takes a Village is also personal. Clinton talks about the embarrassed silence that greeted her at her law firm when she became pregnant in 1979. She captures the transformation that Chelsea’s birth wrought, the quotidian details of early parenthood, including the horror she felt as her baby started foaming at the nose during a bungled breast-feeding session. She beautifully renders that sense of helplessness, and the aspirations for her infant, so deeply shared by all American parents.
I was captivated. But the interplay of my own nature and nurture complicated matters. In the New York primary, I voted for Sanders and split the delegates, my schizophrenia rearing its ugly head.
I’m a Brooklyn girl, an alumna of the high school that spawned Bernie Sanders. In the 1968 race between Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon, my father cast his vote for Dick Gregory, an African-American comedian, civil rights activist, and write-in candidate of the Freedom and Peace Party. I’m also the daughter of a second-wave feminist, a member of Women’s Strike for Peace, who clawed her way to a solid career in mid-life.
I’ve been tangled up in blue, of the progressive hue.
Clinton is the smartest, sanest, and most competent one in this horrifying political nightmare. The media coverage of her has been seriously gendered. Why has no one given her credit for venturing forth into the maelstrom of health care reform? And yes, I long to see the ultimate glass ceiling broken. Yet, as a public servant, Clinton has adopted policies, or supported those of her husband, that have been seriously at odds with my core values—and in some cases, her own. Like mass incarceration and welfare reform, each of which had a devastating impact on black women, children, and men.
Early this year, in a conversation with Alicia Garza, one of the founders of Black Lives Matters, New Yorker editor David Remnick summed up Clinton’s stance in a meeting she’d had with movement representatives. “You’re interested in changing hearts,” he recounted her saying, “I’m interested, as a politician, in changing laws.” Garza’s vote would go elsewhere. “We’re always in a dialectical relationship between changing culture, or changing hearts or changing policy,” she said.
Clinton needs to be nimble, to move among the different elements of the dialectic, her heart open, policy responsive, and ear to the ground on the seismic cultural changes of our time. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and their supporters have pushed her along, and they’ll continue to do so. So will the “mothers of the movement,” those of slain black men, who have been given pride of place at the Democratic convention. Not to mention Michelle Obama, who stole the show with her spirited validation of her husband’s former opponent.
The choice is between someone we hope will show her true self: Hillary Clinton–and someone whose true self is abhorrent to all progressive values.
Let Hillary be Hillary.
There were excellent speeches at the Democratic convention. It would be hard to say which one was best.
But from an informal poll of friends and family, many people thought this this short segment was the high point of the convention. This is the parents of a Muslim soldier killed in action in Iraq while protecting his unit from a suicide bomber; his father waved a copy of the U.S. Constitution and urged Donald Trump too read it.
Or see this version, which includes a description of their son’s heroism.
One of my sons told me he wept as he watched it.
Anthony Cody, co-founder of the Network for Public Education, strongly supported Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination. Like Bernie’s many millions of followers, Anthony was deeply disappointed when Bernie lost the nomination and thoroughly disgusted when he learned that the Democratic National Committee had undermined Bernie’s campaign.
What to do now? Anthony will vote for Clinton, but not with enthusiasm.
He writes:
How will education reform be handled by a Clinton administration? We know that big money held sway over education policy under President Obama. Candidate Clinton has been vague and inconsistent, offering both criticism and praise for charter schools and high stakes tests. Tim Kaine has shown a better understanding of education issues. But in 2008, many of us thought that Obama would be better than George W. Bush on education, especially with Linda Darling-Hammond advising him. But then the hedge fund money talked, Darling-Hammond walked, and we got seven years of Arne Duncan. So the only thing that will keep Clinton from going the way Obama went is intense grassroots pressure.
All of this brings us to the great challenge this election presents to us. We have a balancing act to perform. While I plan to vote for Clinton, we cannot simply “get on board” the DNC campaign train. We cannot unsee the corruption, the deep flaws in Clinton and her corporate allies. There IS something wrong with taking big money for speeches from Wall Street financiers, especially when they invite you back time after time – and you refuse to share what you told them.
We must continue to uncover the corruption of both corporate Democrats and corporate Republicans. If grassroots organizing can reclaim the Democratic Party so it fights for working people, then that would be excellent. Such a reclamation is under way over in Britain right now and is worth watching. If corporate Democratic Party leadership clings to power and will not allow this to happen, then a third party alternative should be strengthened. I respect those who have already made this leap, but I cannot do so while Trump looms. I have joined Bernie Sanders effort to continue his political revolution and defeat Donald Trump, and look forward to the continued growth of this movement.
The speeches at the convention last night were outstanding.
Here is President Obama. Here is the transcript of his speech.
Here is Joe Biden, who was wonderful. Here is the text.
Here is Tim Kaine. He does a pretty good imitation of Trump.
Here is Michael Bloomberg, eviscerating Donald Trump’s claims to be a great businessman.
Nobody does it better than Bill.
Diane Ravitch's blog 