Despite there being no actual sources, an array of mainstream media falsely reported that House Democrats ‘booed’ Bernie Sanders in a close-door meeting the other day.
Once again, a massive smear against Bernie Sanders has occurred in the mainstream political news with no actual citation for the claim that presidential hopeful was ‘booed’ at a House Democrat meeting in Washington.
CNN reported “roughly a dozen members booed him inside the room” according to “three Democrats who attended the meeting”, yet doesn’t name who reported this.
They go on to say that House Democrats, Rep Steny Hoyer told reporters he was sitting in the front row during the meeting with Sanders and didn’t hear anyone booing, and that Rep Gerry Connolly tweeted “Bernie was respectfully received by Caucus. Some disagreements, yes, but a friendly venue” and “Sanders was reflective and thoughtful in responses. Expressions of disagreement are NOT booing.”
Despite this, other “news” outlets are also spreading the lie.
Politico wrote, “Some Democrats booed Sanders” while not reporting who or how many.
The L.A. Times said “boos erupted” despite having no sources for this claim.
The Washington Post also claimed booing without any sources.
When using simple critical thinking skills, one can easily deduce that no booing actually occurred since nobody is saying who did the booing and nobody is giving their name to the press besides two people who said there was no booing. (Three, if you count Sanders himself).
Just hours before Hillary Clinton’s first joint campaign appearance with President Obama, FBI director James B. Comey stated that he does not recommend criminal charges against the former Secretary of State.
Despite calling Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server for classified emails “extremely careless”, Comey said today that he does not recommend filing criminal charges against the presumptive Democratic nominee. Comey said that an ordinary government official could have faced at least an administrative sanction. He also said there was no evidence that she or her lawyers had intentionally deleted or withheld any emails.
The FBI questioned Clinton on Saturday, only a couple days after it was reported that former president Bill Clinton had held a meeting with Attorney General Loretta Lynch who is responsible for the government’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails. Lynch later said she would take the FBI’s lead on whether or not to prosecute Hillary.
Hillary had denied that her husband’s meeting with Lynch had anything to do with the email investigation, but critics are extremely skeptical. Not only has Hillary withheld transcripts from speeches she gave to Goldman Sachs, but she even withheld roughly 50,000 pages of emails that she claimed were personal and had nothing to do with work, according to the New York Times.
5. Unforeseen Events Surrounding Hillary Clinton Criminal Allegations
Given the fact that nobody really knows what’s in Julian Assange’s upcoming Wikileak release of Hillary Clinton’s email server, the fact that the FBI still has not indicted Clinton on espionage charges, and the fact that there’s multiple lawsuits targeting Clinton in the works regarding her role in voter suppression throughout the Democratic primary, there really isn’t any reason to believe that nothing will happen and Hillary will simply continue on as the nominee after July 25th.
That being said, the system *IS* rigged in Hillary’s favor to be the presidential nominee in the Democratic party. She had over 400 superdelegates on her side over a year ago before the primary even started, has every mainstream media outlet and Wall St. on her side, and she’s been brushing off allegations against her as “conspiracy theories” for decades already. There’s no reason to believe that she can’t come out on top, at least as the Democratic nominee, which leaves Bernie Sanders with only about two feasible options left: Run as an Independent or on the Green party ticket with Jill Stein.
As Politico’s Daniel Strauss put it, flipping enough superdelegates to Bernie Sanders by July 25th is a “moonshoot” that would “require an astonishing feat of political engineering” — but is Sanders capable of pulling it off?
When Jeff Weaver told CNN’s Jake Tapper that superdelegates don’t vote until July 25th, he had to repeat himself a few times because Tapper just couldn’t wrap his head around why Sanders would continue. It’s most likely because Sanders understands that a lot can happen in a month, and things don’t exactly look good for Hillary Clinton regarding criminal allegations.
There’s enough evidence of improper conduct by the DNC, voter suppression, and even rigged voter machines to convince Bernie supporters that she’s not an honest politician, but how to get superdelegates to vote for Bernie? Most would say “Via his platform” but, unfortunately, the DNC already struck down an amendment proposed by Minnesota Representative Keith Ellison to demand a raise of the minimum wage to $15/hr and opposing the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) at a vote of 6 in favor to 8 not. This (if not the entire primary season) is a foreshadow to how the superdelegates are going to vote at the convention and most likely means Bernie will not successfully flip enough of them to win the nomination.
In a scathing overview of how Brexit demonstrates the failures of the global economy, presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders pens an op-ed for the New York Times
“Surprise, surprise. Workers in Britain, many of whom have seen a decline in their standard of living while the very rich in their country have become much richer, have turned their backs on the European Union and a globalized economy that is failing them and their children.” — Bernie Sanders, New York Times
In his usual onslaught of alarming statistical data, the U.S. Senator from Vermont, and presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders tells the DNC to focus on the real issue that matters above all else: economic inequality. While many critics of Brexit are focused on the xenophobic aspect of the historic vote last Friday, they may fail to see how economic inequality activists like him would take a stance against the EU at this time, but they would basically be blind to say so.
Senator Bernie Sanders isn’t supporting neo-nationalism. He’s simply using Brexit as the most current example of how difficult life has become for ordinary people throughout the world.
He points to how, in America, nearly 60,000 factories have shut down over the past 15 years or so, disintegrating more than 4.8 million factory jobs along with it, attributing this disasterous change to free-trade agreements that have repeatedly encouraged corporations to move their operations to the cheapest bidder overseas. He accurately explains how the average male worker in the United States today actually makes $726 less than he did in 1973, and points out the even worse downgraded salary for females who make $1,154 less than they did in 2007.
In another article today, we examined how the Brexit could effect America, but Bernie really sums it up by saying,
That increasingly globalized economy, established and maintained by the world’s economic elite, is failing people everywhere. Incredibly, the wealthiest 62 people on this planet own as much wealth as the bottom half of the world’s population — around 3.6 billion people. The top 1 percent now owns more wealth than the whole of the bottom 99 percent. The very, very rich enjoy unimaginable luxury while billions of people endure abject poverty, unemployment, and inadequate health care, education, housing and drinking water.
Could this rejection of the current form of the global economy happen in the United States? You bet it could.
In what some are calling convenient timing, a top suspect in a bribery case involving Clinton Foundation donors and the former United Nations General Assembly President has suddenly died of asphyxiation from a barbell
John Ashe, 61, was pumping iron in his Westchester, New York home when authorities say he dropped a barbell on his own throat, crushing his larynx, according to the local medical examiner, reports CNN. The autopsy report will take around 16 weeks to complete.
This report comes as a shock to many, including the U.S. government who believes Ashe to have been complicit in accepting and facilitating more than $1.3 million in bribes from Chinese billionaire business magnate Ng Lap Seng, a major Clinton Foundation donor. Ashe was awaiting trial and was set to testify on his role in the scandal soon.
Ashe was amid plea negotiations, according to a letter sent to U.S. District Judge Vernon Broderick last month from Ashe’s lawyer, Jeremy Schneider, which raises suspicion on whether or not his death is in fact an accident or a murder conducted on behalf of associated parties.
Ashe was accused last year by United States federal authorities of turning his powerful UN position into a “platform for profit” along with Francis Lorenzo, the ambassador to the UN for the Dominican Republic, who’s been accused of helping Ng pay bribes to Ashe and others political figures in the Caribbean.
This event comes just two months after RT America ran a story outing Clinton Foundation donors who have shown up in the Panama Papers document leak:
“A new report by McClatchy, one of more than 100 journalism outlets with access to the leaked documents, reveals a number of Clinton donors and associates used Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, “global provider for legal and trust services,” for their offshore accounting.”
Ng Lan Seng, currently incarcerated in the U.S. on charges of bribery in the John Ashe case, has close ties to the Clinton family and the Democratic National Committee, not only being a major donor to the Clinton Foundation in recent times but also pleading guilty to a felony for illegal contributions to the DNC in a Democratic fund-raising scandal towards the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency and the beginning of Al Gore’s presidential campaign. In 1998, a Senate committee reported Ng, of Macau, China, sent $1.1 million to Little Rock, Arkansas restaurateur, Yah Lin, who in turn contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Democratic National Committee for years on Ng’s behalf. Ng’s relationship with the Clintons is well documented as he had visited the White House 10 times from 1994 to 1996 and had his photograph taken with President Bill Clinton and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, as seen in the attached photo from ABC News. Ng was also, according to court papers, served in July 2014 with a subpoena to appear Sept. 17, 2014 in connection with an unrelated investigation, but never showed up.
USA Today reports on Ng’s recent incarceration,
At a bail hearing Saturday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Richenthal described Yin, a U.S. citizen, as Ng’s right-hand man in his U.S. operations, someone who played a key role in transmitting funds.
The prosecutor said Yin spoke to law enforcement after his Saturday arrest, admitting he transmitted money on Ng’s behalf to pay people to do unlawful things, though Yin interrupted the prosecutor, saying: “That is not true,” according to a hearing transcript.
Federal Defender Sabrina Shroff, representing Yin, said at the hearing that her client, educated in the United States with family here, may have served as Ng’s “mouthpiece” but the cash and the investments were not Yin’s.
“He doesn’t know what Mr. Seng is doing with the money at the end of the day,” Shroff said.
Ng’s arrest occurred in September of 2015 and spurred the investigation into John Ashe when authorities discovered Ng had, according to Manhattan federal court papers, smuggled over $4.5 million into the United States over several years with the excuse that he had used the money for gambling and buying paintings from art dealers. According to the New York District Attorney Preet Bharara and the FBI, Ng and Yin were previously arrested on September 19, 2015, based on a separate complaint alleging that Ng agreed to make false statements to Customs and Border Protection officers about the true purpose of the cash that Ng and Yin had brought into the U.S. from China since 2013.
Once again, MSNBC pretends that Bernie Sanders is done with his campaign, twisting what he said out of context in order to spread disinformation and urge him to concede (Hint: he’s not conceding before July 25th).
If you didn’t think a “reputable” news source like MSNBC could stoop to the level of Fox News this year, you’re naive.
This entire presidential election season has been riddled with a media blackout against Bernie Sanders of unprecedented proportion, blowing the minds of millennials and re-igniting the call to revolution by Baby Boomers and Generation Xers who believe in his message that crony capitalism and an eroding middle class has got to stop. Between ridiculously large super PACs and a hidden agenda predetermined since at least early 2015, when superdelegates were polled to the tune of almost 100% of them pledging for Hillary Clinton before the race even started, it’s obvious that the mainstream media has been bought and paid for by the Clinton campaign.
That’s why, when asked if he would vote for Hillary Clinton in November to defeat Trump and Bernie Sanders gave a hypothetical “yes” to the newscasters at MSNBC’s Morning Joe this morning, I was not shocked to see the channel immediately post “BREAKING NEWS — SANDERS: ‘YES’ I’LL VOTE FOR HILLARY CLINTON” at the bottom of the screen. This is the sort of sound bite they’ve been foaming at the mouth for since long before the California primary and, in their minds, they finally got it.
What did he actually say? In the video below, you can see he was clearly talking about voting for her to beat Donald Trump, not because he wants her as president. He clearly goes on to explain his stance in detail, even saying,
“My job is to fight for the strongest possible platform in the Democratic convention and, as we speak, in St. Louis that is going on right now. And that means a platform that represents working people, that stands up to Big Money interests. I don’t want to parse words. What I am trying to do right now is to make sure that the Democratic Party becomes a party that represents working people, not Wall Street, that is prepared to have an agenda speaks to the need of creating millions of jobs, raising the minimum wage to 15 bucks an hour, dealing with climate change, dealing with pay equity.”
And even after saying this, they STILL pressured him for an answer to whether or not he would be officially conceding. He answered in his well-recognized firm and asserted political stance with,
“Why would I want to do that when I want to fight to make sure we have the best platform that we possibly can, that we win the most delegates that we can. The goal of our campaign was to transform this nation.”
The sad part is that any loyal fans of the news station tuning in without their volume up wouldn’t have heard Sanders go on to explain how, right now, the importance should be on turning the Democratic Party in a party that actually represents the people.
What’s worse is that the newscasters asked if he thought the “disunity” within the party would put Hillary at a disadvantage against Donald Trump in the general election. The REAL ISSUE here is within the Senator’s answer to the question, an issue they really don’t seem to care much about,
“You talk about ‘disunity’, I’m talking about involving the American people in the political process and wanting to have a government and a party that represents all of us. When you have disunity, what we’re talking about is kids can’t afford to go to college, or leaving college $50,000 in debt, people dying because they don’t get to a doctor when they should. Talk about disunity is the fact that we have 47 million people living in poverty.”
WATCH: Get the context for Bernie’s conversation about fixing the DNC, restoring the middle class, and the negative effects of corporate globalization in the video below:
The newscasters have a hard time moving on from Bernie’s answer, and that’s because they don’t want to talk about what he’s talking about. All they care about is ratings, and that’s because they make more money than the average working class American. This attitude from the mainstream media makes Bernie’s very presence only that much more defiant and strengthens his platform. They are giving him a medium in which to reach a very large audience, something they’ve barely done over the course of the 2016 primary season.
Lars Beniger
Lars is a freelance journalist, part-time activist, copywriter and technical writer residing in the Manhattan, New York area. For 7 years, Lars has reported on current events, political spars, technology and environmental issues.
Having outlasted all his opponents, Donald Trump is the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party. Hillary Clinton is closing in on locking up the Democratic nomination.
Clinton and Trump may have won primaries, but are they really representative of what the American people want? In fact, as we will show, it is John Kasich and Bernie Sanders who are first in the nation’s esteem. Trump and Clinton come last.
So how has it come to this? The media has played a big role, of course, but that Trump versus Clinton will almost surely be the choice this November is the result of the totally absurd method of election used in the primaries: majority voting.
This is a strong statement. But as mathematicians who have spent the last dozen years studying voting systems, we are going to show you why it’s justified and how this problem can be fixed.
The problem with majority voting
With majority voting (MV), voters tick the name of one candidate, at most, and the numbers of ticks determine the winner and the order of finish. It’s a system that is used across the U.S. (and in many other nations) to elect presidents as well as senators, representatives and governors.
But it has often failed to elect the candidate preferred by the majority.
In 2000, for example, George W. Bush was elected president because of Ralph Nader’s candidacy. In the contested state of Florida, Bush had 2,912,790 votes, Al Gore 2,912,253 (a mere 537 fewer) and Nader 97,488. There is little doubt that the large majority of those who voted for Nader, and so preferred him to the others, much preferred Gore to Bush. Had they been able to express this preference, Gore would have been elected with 291 Electoral College votes to Bush’s 246. Similar dysfunctions have also occurred in France.
Imagine how different the U.S. and the world might be today if Gore had won.
The 2016 primaries
A quick glance at the U.S. presidential primaries and caucuses held on or before March 1 shows that when Trump was the “winner,” he typically garnered some 40 percent of the votes. However, nothing in that result factors in the opinions of the 60 percent of voters who cast ballots for someone else.
Eight of the many GOP presidential contenders. Jim Young/Reuters
As Trump is a particularly divisive candidate, it is safe to suppose that most – or at least many – of them strongly opposed him. The media, however, focused on the person who got the largest number of votes – which means Trump. On the Democratic side of the ledger, the media similarly poured its attention on Hillary Clinton, ignoring Bernie Sanders until widespread enthusiastic support forced a change.
The source of the problem
An election is nothing but an invented device that measures the electorate’s support of the candidates, ranks them according to their support and declares the winner to be the first in the ranking.
The fact is that majority voting does this very badly.
With MV, voters cannot express their opinions on all candidates. Instead, each voter is limited to backing just one candidate, to the exclusion of all others in the running.
Bush defeated Gore because Nader voters were unable to weigh in on the other two. Moreover, as we argue further on, majority voting can go wrong even when there are just two candidates.
The point is that it is essential for voters to be able to express the nuances of their opinions.
MJ asks voters to express their opinions much more accurately than simply voting for one candidate. The ballot offers a spectrum of choices and charges voters with a solemn task:
To be the President of the United States of America, having taken into account all relevant considerations, I judge that this candidate as president would be a: Great President | Good President | Average President | Poor President | Terrible President
To see exactly how MJ ranks the candidates, let’s look at specific numbers.
We were lucky to find on the web that the above question was actually posed in a March Pew Research Center poll of 1,787 registered voters of all political stripes. (It should be noted that neither the respondents nor the pollsters were aware that the answers could be the basis for a method of election.) The Pew poll also included the option of answering “Never Heard Of” which here is interpreted as worse than “Terrible” since it amounts to the voter saying the candidate doesn’t exist.
As is clear in the table below, people’s opinions are much more detailed than can be expressed with majority voting. Note in particular the relatively high percentages of voters who believe Clinton and especially Trump would make terrible presidents (Pew reports that Trump’s “Terrible” score increased by 6 percent since January.)
Using majority judgment to calculate the ranked order of the candidates from these evaluations or grades is straightforward. Start from each end of the spectrum and add percentages until a majority of voters’ opinions are included.
Taking John Kasich as an example, 5 percent believe he is “Great,” 5+28=33 percent that he is “Good” or better, and 33+39=72 percent (a majority) that he is “Average” or better. Looked at from the other end, 9 percent “Never Heard” of him, 9+7=16 percent believe he is “Terrible” or worse, 16+13=29 percent that he is “Poor” or worse, and 29+39= 68 percent (a majority) that he is “Average” or worse.
Both calculations end on majorities for “Average,” so Kasich’s majority-grade is “Average President.” (Mathematically, the calculations from both directions for a given candidate will always reach majorities at the same grade.)
Similarly calculated, Sanders, Clinton and Cruz all have the same majority-grade, “Average President.” Trump’s is “Poor President,” ranking him last.
To determine the MJ ranking among the four who all are rated “Average,” two more calculations are necessary.
The first looks at the percentage of voters who rate a candidate more highly than his or her majority-grade, the second at the percentage who rate the candidate lower than his or her majority-grade. This delivers a number called the “gauge.” Think of it as a scale where in some cases the majority grade leans more heavily toward a higher ranking and in others more heavily toward a lower ranking.
In Kasich’s case, 5+28=33 percent evaluated him higher than “Average,” and 13+7+9=29 percent rated him below “Average.” Because the larger share is on the positive side, his gauge is +33 percent. For Sanders, 36 percent evaluated him above and 39 percent below his majority-grade. With the larger share on the negative side, his gauge is -39 percent.
A candidate is ranked above another when his or her majority-grade is better or, if both have the same majority-grade, according to their gauges (see below). This rule is the logical result of majorities deciding on candidates’ grades instead of the usual rule that ranks candidates by the numbers of votes they get.
When voters are able to express their evaluations of every candidate – the good and the bad – the results are turned upside-down from those with majority voting.
According to majority judgment, the front-runners in the collective opinion are actually Kasich and Sanders. Clinton and Trump are the trailers. From this perspective the dominant media gave far too much attention to the true trailers and far too little to the true leaders.
Tellingly, MJ also shows society’s relatively low esteem for politicians. All five candidates are evaluated as “Average” presidents or worse, and none as “Good” presidents or better.
Majority voting’s failure with two candidates
But, you may object, how can majority voting on just two candidates go wrong? This seems to go against everything you learned since grade school where you raised your hand for or against a classroom choice.
The reason MV can go wrong even with only two candidates is because it does not obtain sufficient information about a voter’s intensity of support.
Take, as an example, the choice between Clinton and Trump, whose evaluations in the Pew poll are given in the first table above.
Lining up their grades from highest to lowest, every one of Clinton’s is either above or the same as Trump’s. Eleven percent, for example, believe Clinton would make a “Great” president to 10 percent for Trump. Trump’s percentages lead Clinton’s only for the Terrible’s and Never Heard Of’s. Given these opinions, in other words, it’s clear that any decent voting method must rank Clinton above Trump.
However, majority voting could fail to do so.
To see why, suppose the “ballots” of the Pew poll were in a pile. Each could be looked at separately. Some would rate Clinton “Average” and Trump “Poor,” some would rate her “Good” and him “Great,” others would assign them any of the 36 possible couples of grades. We can, therefore, find the percentage of occurrence of every couple of grades assigned to Trump and Clinton.
We do not have access to the Pew poll “ballots.” However, one could come up with many different scenarios where the individual ballot percentages are in exact agreement with the overall grades each received in the first table.
Among the various scenarios possible, we have chosen one that could, in theory, be the true one. Indeed, you can check for yourself that it does assign the candidates the grades each received: reading from left to right, Clinton, for example, had 10+12=22 percent “Good,” 16+4=20 percent “Average,” and so on; and the same holds for Trump.
So what does this hypothetical distribution of the ballots concerning the two tell us?
The first column on the left says 10 percent of the voters rated Clinton “Good” and Trump “Great.” In a majority vote they would go for Trump. And moving to the tenth column, 4 percent rated Clinton “Poor” and Trump “Terrible.” In a majority vote this group would opt for Clinton. And so on.
If you add up the votes in each of these 11 columns, Trump receives the votes of the people whose opinions are reflected in four columns: 10+16+12+15=53 percent; Clinton is backed by the voters with the opinions of columns with 33 percent support; and 14 percent are undecided. Even if the undecided all voted for Clinton, Trump would carry the day.
This shows that majority voting can give a very wrong result: a triumphant victory for Trump when Clinton’s grades are consistently above his!
A bird’s-eye view
Voting has been the subject of intense mathematical research since 1950, when the economist Kenneth Arrow published his famous “impossibility theorem,” one of the two major contributions for which he was awarded the 1972 Nobel Prize.
Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794) was a French philosopher and mathematician.
This theorem showed that if voters have to rank candidates – to say, in other words, who comes first, second and so forth – there will inevitably be one of two major potential failures. Either there may be no clear winner at all, the so-called “Condorcet paradox” occurs, or what has come to be called the “Arrow paradox” may occur.
The Arrow paradox is familiar to Americans because of what happened in the 2000 election. Bush beat Gore because Nader was in the running. Had Nader not run, Gore would have won. Surely, it is absurd for the choice between two candidates to depend on whether or not some minor candidate is on the ballot!
Majority judgment resolves the conundrum of Arrow’s theorem: neither the Condorcet nor the Arrow paradox can occur. It does so because voters are asked for more accurate information, to evaluate candidates rather than to rank them.
MJ’s rules, based on the majority principle, meet the basic democratic goals of voting systems. With it:
Voters are able to express themselves more fully, so the results depend on much more information than a single vote.
The process of voting has proven to be natural, easy and quick: we all know about grading from school (as the Pew poll implicitly realized).
Candidates with similar political profiles can run without impinging on each other’s chances: a voter can give high (or low) evaluations to all.
The candidate who is evaluated best by the majority wins.
MJ is the most difficult system to manipulate: blocs of voters who exaggerate the grades they give beyond their true opinions can only have a limited influence on the results.
By asking more of voters, by showing more respect for their opinions, participation is encouraged. Even a voter who evaluates all candidates identically (e.g., all are “Terrible”) has an effect on the outcome.
Final grades – majority-grades – enable candidates and the public to understand where each stands in the eyes of the electorate.
If the majority decides that no candidate is judged an “Average President” or better, the results of the election may be rescinded, and a new slate of candidates demanded.
It should come as no surprise that in answer to a recent Pew poll’s question “Do you think the primaries have been a good way of determining who the best qualified nominees are or not?” only 35 percent of respondents said yes.
Democracies everywhere are suffering. Voters protest. Citizens don’t vote. Support for the political extremes are increasing. One of the underlying causes, we argue, is majority voting as it is now practiced, and its influence on the media.
Misled by the results of primaries and polls, the media concentrates its attention on candidates who seem to be the leaders, but who are often far from being deemed acceptable by a majority of the electorate. Majority judgment would correct these failings.
Romanian hacker Guccifer 2.0 shared another generous excerpt from their treasure trove of stolen government server documents on Thursday.
Last week, a free and anonymous WordPress blog set up by someone calling themselves Guccifer 2.0 was widely shared on social media purporting to contain documents the hacker stole from the Democratic National Convention and Hillary Clinton. While that blog post only contained a little less than 10 documents, today the hacker shared yet another much larger load of documents, including some regarding The Clinton Foundation, and gave an interview to VICE magazine’s technology division Motherboard.
This release, Guccifer 2.0 says, is making good on his promise from a week ago, but it is still unclear as to whether it proves any criminal wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton or the DNC. However, it does show some major donors (presumably Super PAC donors) including Steven Spielberg, Bill Maher, Chelsea Handler and others, along with a list of Hillary’s speeches (no transcripts, unfortunately).
Despite the hacker claiming to be Romanian and hating “being attributed to Russia,” an official from the DNC, Motherboard reports, said in an emailed statement,
“our experts are confident in their assessment that the Russian government hackers were the actors responsible for the breach detected in April, and we believe that the subsequent release and the claims around it may be a part of a disinformation campaign by the Russians.”
All of the files contained in the zip file, now being widely spread online, are dated in April of 2016, so it does correlate at least to the time frame of the suspected hack of the DNC earlier this year.
Bernie Sanders apparently does not agree with most of his hardcore supporters who feel the Democratic Primary has been rigged in Hillary Clinton’s favor.
Vermont senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders visited his home town of Burlington, VT to discuss the state of the campaign with his top advisers today, concluding with an appearance to give a statement to the media regarding his plans and briefly send his condolences to the families of those who perished in the Orlando mass shooting last night.
While Sanders reiterated his plan to carry the campaign through to the bitter end at the Democratic National Convention on July 25th, he emphasized an important tenet of his platform: this is a “political revolution” that “does not stop on election day.”
This point was further supported with his call to young Americans to get involved in politics on the local level by showing up to meetings, campaigning for political positions, and continuing to vote after November.
One major aspect of Sanders’ campaign that marks the stark contrast between him and the two presidential front-runners, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, is his continued emphasis on young people becoming more politically aware and sticking to their convictions until they see the change they are looking for.
A couple weeks ago, Sanders told CBS news that he didn’t feel the election was rigged against him, but that the entire process was very “dumb” and has a lot of problems, especially the issue of superdelegates:
“I wouldn’t use the word rigged, because we knew what the words were – but what is really dumb is that you have closed primaries, like in New York state, where three million people who are Democrats or Republicans could not participate, where you have situation where over 400 superdelegates came on board Clinton’s campaign before anybody else was in the race, eight months before the first vote was cast. That’s not rigged. I think it’s just a dumb process which has certainly disadvantaged our campaign.”
Many of his supporters feel that this is either wrong or basically the same thing as being “rigged”. Those who feel he is wrong to say this are most likely some who experienced one of the many effects of voter suppression, such as voter registrations being purged from databases, party affiliations being mysteriously switched and the obvious discrepancy between exit polls and vote tallies. California, especially, seemed to carry some of the strangest problems, such as how certain voters needed to know a password to get a ballot and a massive difference in the number of registered voters vs. the number of votes tallied.
Those who feel the system is set up against them are pretty much in agreement with Bernie and have vowed to continue the struggle, as he suggests, and carry the revolution beyond the convention in July.
Lars Beniger
Lars is a freelance journalist, part-time activist, copywriter and technical writer residing in the Manhattan, New York area. For 7 years, Lars has reported on current events, political spars, technology and environmental issues.
sent $1.1 million to Little Rock, Arkansas restaurateur, Yah Lin, who in turn contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Democratic National Committee for years on Ng’s behalf. Ng’s relationship with the Clintons is well documented as he had visited the White House 10 times from 1994 to 1996 and had his photograph taken with President Bill Clinton and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, as seen in the attached photo from 
