Revolution News, Vol. 9: change of venue

Father's Day was the most recent of these, so we're overdue for an update.

After the pair appeared at the joint rally, the Guardian asked Sanders supporters: what now?

We received 375 responses on readers’ plans for their November vote. And despite the show of solidarity with Clinton on Tuesday, Sanders’ fans aren’t all convinced the presumptive Democratic nominee is who they will now support: Green party nominee Jill Stein was the most popular among reader respondents, with 171 new supporters, more than double the number who said they would move their support to Clinton.

A write-in vote for Sanders was also a popular option, with just 20 respondents opting for Trump. These results aren’t necessarily a representative sample, and they differ significantly from a Pew Research Center poll released Wednesday, which found that 85% of Sanders supporters intended to vote for Clinton.

 

How Bernie Sanders supporters plan to vote in November

Source: Guardian | Graphic: Jan Diehm/The Guardian

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171/375 = 45.6%, so this anecdotal survey indeed produces a wildly different result from Pew's recent scientific poll, also referenced yesterday in an update and linked via The Guardian in the third graf above.  What to make of such a vast discrepancy?  What you like.  For now, it's just another data point.

"Donations to Stein campaign increase exponentially":

Since Tuesday morning, the Green Party has received over $80,000 in contributions, over half of which comes from first-time donors, and half of which comes in the form of contributions under $50. Tellingly, about 615 of those contributions totalled $27, the exact number commonly trumpeted and solicited by the Sanders campaign during his revolutionary grassroots funding movement.

“There’s been an explosion of Berners coming in through every portal of the campaign, and it’s really exciting,” Stein told US Uncut in a phone interview. “There is so much courage out there to stand up to the marching orders handed down by the usual suspects.”

Stein’s social media accounts have also seen tremendous growth and engagement in the past 24 hours. A recent livestream posted to the Stein campaign’s Facebook page has been viewed over 300,000 times in less than a day. Her page itself has added approximately 44,000 new likes in the past week. Her Twitter account has over 145,000 followers as of this writing, increasing by the tens of thousands just this week, with 5.6 million impressions on July 12-13 alone. There have also been 10,000 new signups for her email list since yesterday.

And according to web traffic ranking site Alexa, Jill2016.com has been climbing steadily in popularity since January, with rapid monthly growth since March. The search term “Jill Stein” has also seen a hockey-stick increase on Google Trends since the endorsement:

Duopolists will scoff at the $80K figure, but will probably be swallowing a little harder the next time they look at a quarterly campaign finance report.  The ultimate goal for the next 60 days or so remains; 15% in the national polling, leading to Stein's inclusion in the presidential debates, the schedule for which was announced this week (the first is slated for September 26).  In order to be in the debates, her name needs to be included in the polls.  Time is short.  You may petition the Commission on Presidential Debates for redress of this grievance at this site.

According to Stein’s website, her campaign has secured ballot access in 23 states and Washington, DC, and petition signatures are currently being collected for ballot access in 27 others. Stein said her campaign has “many irons in the fire” and will be on “90 to 95 percent” of ballots after petitions are delivered to various Secretaries of State.

In the end, despite being labeled as a “spoiler” candidate by Clinton supporters and staunch Democrats in a winner-take-all political system, Stein is optimistic about her chances if she’s able to communicate her message to a national TV audience at the general election debates.

[...]

“If that word gets out, that can be a very powerful motivator for those people to vote for my campaign, and that’s a plurality of votes.” Stein continued. “In the words of Alice Walker, ‘The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.'”

I can't say I'm overjoyed about HA Goodman's conversion, but here it is (apply the blind hogs and acorns rationale).

Fear is the ultimate weapon of establishment Democrats and people who want nothing more than for you to “fall in line.”

I’ll admire and respect Bernie Sanders forever, but I’ll never “fall in line” and vote for anyone advised by Henry Kissinger, or Bush’s neoconservatives. As Robert Kagan stated regarding Clinton’s foreign policy, “If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue…it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.”

Sorry, not voting for a Democrat with a “neocon” foreign policy.

Give Jill Stein a look, and give her platform serious consideration. Around half of Bernie voters according to Bloomberg in late June will never vote for Hillary; a far more accurate assessment in my view than recent claims of the majority flocking to Clinton.

Whatever the percentage of conversions happens to be, there's some serious momentum now for Stein, and one of many Berning Questions is how far can she take it.

Two out of three ain't bad

-- My timing was a few days off on Trump and Pence teaming up -- Il Douche whiffed by missing the chance to steal the news cycle yesterday from Hillary and Bernie -- but it looks as if I'll be right by Friday.  Pence, fresh from the tanning bed, delivered the line that will be repeated on an endless loop from now until the leaves fall off the trees.

"I think it would be extremely careless to elect Hillary Clinton as the next president of the United States."

Let's observe that the Sheldon Primary has elected Newt Gingrich the vice-presidential nominee, so I'll surmise that's the last obstacle for the Orange-utan to overcome, thus the delay.

Some donors are pressuring Trump to pick Gingrich. A source close to Sheldon Adelson tells CNN that the casino magnate spoke to Trump and mentioned that "he liked Newt."

"Favoring is a more appropriate term," the source said of Adelson's conversation with Trump.

I do like my oligarchy with a skosh of plutocracy.

Update: This impulsive, unfortunate, regrettable insertion of herself into the election has me shaking my head at Justice RBG.  The crack about moving to New Zealand reveals her own unfounded fears of a Trump presidency.  Of all the people in the United States who are capable of relocating across the planet who will never actually do so (she's got one of the best jobs there is, and it's for life), Ruth Bader Ginsberg is signaling that she needs a Xanax and a glass of wine.  And somebody who can persuade her to stay away from picking fights with Drumpf.

Update II: Election Law Blog's Rick Hasen agrees.

With respect to recent polling, the swing states are closing up but there's no reason for worry.  This is predictable erosion from last week's non-indictment.  Trump is about to pick his running mate, the RNC is coming up, he's going to get some more bounces, maybe even move ahead of Clinton in the polling next week and almost certainly the week after.  That's how the presidential cycle goes; it happened in '08 right after McCain picked Palin.  He pulled into the lead.  Briefly.

I'll be blogging about the pants-crapping Democrats making themselves physically ill with worry about President Trump in the third and fourth weeks of this month, in-between conventions.  I'll link and mock every one.

There's nothing here to be concerned with, Nellies.  Yet.

-- The New Yorker's John Cassidy called Bernie's endorsement of Hillary 'fulsome'.  We're not actually as strong together as Mrs. Clinton's campaign is projecting.

There was that phrase again. Perhaps nobody had informed Clinton that “Stronger Together” echoes the slogan of the Remain side, which lost the recent Brexit referendum in the U.K. Or perhaps she didn’t care. With Sanders behind her and on message, one of the big challenges facing her campaign had been overcome. Now the task was to make sure that Sanders’s supporters received the message, even if that meant laying it on thick.

Berners showed up at the New Hampshire rally and left amid shouts of 'No!" and tears as Bernie choked the life out of his own political revolution.  It's going to be some time before these believers can reconcile their grief.  Today I would posit that of the choices left to them, not voting at all might be in the lead.  But then there's this, which suggests that most of the sheep are already herding themselves onto the bandwagon.

The financial markets, on the other hand, were much more enthusiastic.  They've been quickly shaking off Brexit -- that's another one I missed -- and rose to all-time highs in the days preceding yesterday, rising higher as the two Democrats spoke effusively of each other.  Oil is still losing ground on oversupply reports, however, so Houston's economy and conservatives will remain fearful about the future.

And speaking of ham-handed sales jobs, Barack Obama is also mistaken if he thinks we're not as divided as it seems.  We are in fact more so.   Be reminded that Obama lives in the same White House bubble that a clearly and publicly intoxicated George W. Bush (embarrassing himself once more) used to live in.



As for the outgoing chief executive, I seem to be immune to his silver-tongued entreaties at these final stages of his public service.  For the incoming one, it's a matter of not getting it and not caring to, and her husband -- his rapidly deteriorating political dexterity failing him -- seems too feeble to give her an assist.  In fact, he looks like that guy in the park with early-onset dementia, feeding the pigeons and trying to decide whether he should fill up his Always or wind his wristwatch.

Hey, I just thought of something: in order to deal with the crisis of ISIS, let's join them and transform them from within.  It certainly makes as much sense as Texas Democrats voting in the GOP primary, doesn't it?

-- Saving the most ignorant and deceptive for last ... Paul Ryan.

Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan defended his decision to support Donald Trump Tuesday, disagreeing with the candidate on several issues but saying that refusing to back Trump amounts to supporting Hillary Clinton.

"It's a binary choice," Ryan told a skeptical voter at a CNN town hall Tuesday. "It is either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton — you don't get a third option. It's one or the other and I know where I want to go." 

Fingers in the third-party dikes, fingers in his ears.  The concept of a hell that burns everlasting was conceived in the minds of men who had to confront the demagoguery of charlatans like Ryan.

After a voter told Ryan he couldn't vote for Trump over what he called racism, Ryan responded: "That basically means you're going to help elect Hillary Clinton. And I don't think Hillary Clinton is going to support any of the things that you stand for if you're a Republican." 

Based on nearly every single post I have published for the past twelve months, it shouldn't surprise you that I can see right through the Speaker.  If you're falling for this line, then you will surely get no relief from your terror if you vote for Trump because you despise Hillary.  And vice versa.

No point in waking Ryan up with the smell of coffee brewing; he's not going to flinch if you threw a whole pot of it, boiling hot, in his face.

Don't be as stupid as Paul Ryan thinks you are.  Please.

-- Steven Colbert isn't joking when he says that Clinton is such a bad candidate that the only person she could defeat is Donald Trump.  She's one and done.  Whether she cracks the top five of worst presidents ever is in her hands.  She starts another war, she can probably knock out Calvin Coolidge for fifth place.