Ridgewood NJ, from Tennessee to New York, and all over New Jersey, Brood X cicadas have emerged out in full force. In 2004, billions of Brood X cicadas burrow underground with heavy hearts and prepare for the worst. Brood X, the Great Eastern Brood, is one of 15 broods of periodical cicadas that appear regularly throughout the eastern United States. It has the greatest range and concentration of any of the 17-year cicadas.
Ridgewood NJ, Hillary Clinton made headlines earlier this week when she told an interviewer on a podcast that no one in Congress likes Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders. According to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 37% of Likely U.S. Voters say they like Sanders more than Clinton. Just 22% like Clinton more. Thirty-nine percent (39%) don’t care for either one of them. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
Among Democratic voters, 45% like Sanders more than Clinton. Thirty-seven percent (37%) prefer Clinton, while 17% say they don’t like either one. So it seems fellow Democrats and voters in general prefer Bernie over Hillary.
Ridgewood NJ, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden are among those touted as serious Democratic presidential contenders in 2020, but three-out-of-four Democrats think their party needs to turn to someone new.
But according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 73% of Likely Democratic Voters believe their party should look for a fresh face to run for president in 2020. Just 16% disagree and think the party should promote a candidate who has already run in the past. Eleven percent (11%) are undecided.
By comparison, with Clinton seen as a shoo-in for the 2016 nomination, just 36% of Democrats were calling for a new face in that election, but an unusually high 21% were undecided.
Among all likely voters, 65% say Democrats should find a new face for 2020, while only 19% think it should go with someone who has run for the White House before. Sixteen percent (16%) are not sure.
Ridgewood NJ, The mainstream media is conspicuously ignoring a newsworthy class-action lawsuit accusing the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Florida congresswoman—Debbie Wasserman Schultz—who chaired it of fraud for skewing the party’s primaries to benefit Hillary Clinton. The drama is playing out in a south Florida federal court where 150 Democratic voters and donors are also accusing their party and Wasserman Schultz of breach of fiduciary duty, negligence, unjust enrichment, and negligent misrepresentation for secretly helping Clinton get the presidential nomination over Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
“Despite the requirements in the Charter, and in spite of the multiple public declarations of neutrality and impartiality with respect to the Democratic primary process, the DNC was not neutral,” a 35-page complaint states. “To the contrary, the DNC was biased in favor of one candidate – Hillary Clinton (“Clinton”) – from the beginning and throughout the process. The DNC devoted its considerable resources to supporting Clinton above any of the other Democratic candidates. Through its public claims to being neutral and impartial, the DNC actively concealed its bias from its own donors as well as donors to the campaigns of Clinton’s rivals, including Bernie Sanders (“Sanders”).
The scandal broke when leaked DNC electronic mail showed that the committee favored and backed Clinton instead of Sanders during the primary. Wasserman Schultz resigned in disgrace as DNC chair, was publicly blasted by Sanders supporters and didn’t gavel in the party convention last summer in Philadelphia. Her hometown newspaper wrote that it was a hurricane-force controversy over leaked emails that showed the DNC under Wasserman Schultz was helping Clinton while Sanders was still a contender for the Democratic presidential nomination. In the article, the veteran congresswoman from Broward County, Florida indicated that she stepped down as DNC chair to focus on “making sure that everyone knows that Hillary Clinton would make the best president.”
Democrats suing her insist that the congresswoman violated DNC’s charter and bylaws that say party chair “shall exercise impartiality and evenhandedness” and “shall be responsible for ensuring that the officers and staff of the DNC maintain impartiality and evenhandedness.” Wasserman Schultz also made public declarations vowing to run a neutral primary, according to the lawsuit, while she and the DNC pushed for Clinton from the start of the 2016 presidential election cycle. The complaint cites a leaked internal DNC document dated May 26, 2015 listing a plan to provide a contrast between “GOP field and HRC [Hillary Rodham Clinton]” as well the use of “specific hits to muddy the waters around ethics, transparency and campaign finance attacks on HRC.” The DNC and Wasserman Schultz had actual knowledge of the wrongfulness of the conduct, the lawsuit says, adding that the conduct was so reckless it constituted a conscious disregard to the rights of the plaintiffs.
In the absence of media interest, the attorneys representing the class, a husband-and-wife team from Miami that supported Sanders, created a website where all documents related to the case are posted as well as courtroom illustrations and information on hearings. The docket is extensive and dates back to June 2016 when the complaint was filed. This is a valuable tool because, unlike state cases, federal court records are not available to the public for free and must be purchased through the government’s online system known as Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER). The database is most commonly used by attorneys and journalists (though not in this case) to research federal criminal, civil and bankruptcy cases. Having access to dozens of documents related to this case is a true bonus, especially since there’s been no local or national media coverage.
The most recent activity in this ongoing political legal drama occurred just weeks ago when plaintiffs and their lawyers filed a motion seeking court-ordered security guards after being harassed and intimidated. Weird emails and phone calls as well as a break-in at a plaintiff’s Dassel, Minnesota home were cited in the motion. The Ft. Lauderdale-based judge, a Reagan appointee, denied the request because plaintiffs live in dozens of different states and it would require the entire United States Marshals Service to direct all of its efforts and attention to this specific case. “For their part, defendants deny any role in the incidents described in plaintiff’s motion,” the judge, William Zloch, wrote in his order. The saga continues and Judicial Watch will monitor it and report pertinent developments.
In the meantime, Wasserman Schultz is embroiled in another major scandal involving her top information technology aide, Imran Awan, who was recently arrested on bank-fraud charges at the airport while trying to flee to his native Pakistan. Awan had just wired $283,000 from the Congressional Federal Credit Union to Pakistan, according to a news report, and he had been fired by other members of Congress after getting busted stealing computers and data systems months earlier. For unknown reasons, Wasserman Schultz kept Awan, whose entire family is embroiled in a major scam, and he had access to her emails and files as well as the password to the electronic device the congresswoman used for DNC business before she was booted out last summer. Wasserman Schultz’s gatekeepers are shielding the notoriously media savvy politician from the media and a Florida newspaper points out that “the Weston Democrat has not explained why she continued to employ Awan,” until his arrest. Judicial Watch has launched an investigation and is pursuing public records.
Inside a decimated party’s not-so-certain revival strategy.
DOVERE January 19, 2017
Standing with some 30,000 people in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia the night before the election watching Hillary Clinton speak, exhausted aides were already worrying about what would come next. They expected her to win, of course, but they knew President Clinton was going to get thrashed in the 2018 midterms—the races were tilted in Republicans’ favor, and that’s when they thought the backlash would really hit. Many assumed she’d be a one-term president. They figured she’d get a primary challenge. Some of them had already started gaming out names for who it would be.
“Last night I stood at your doorstep / Trying to figure out what went wrong,” Bruce Springsteen sang quietly to the crowd in what he called “a prayer for post-election.” “It’s gonna be a long walk home.”
What happened the next night shocked even the most pessimistic Democrats. But in another sense, it was the reckoning the party had been expecting for years. They were counting on a Clinton win to paper over a deeper rot they’ve been worrying about—and to buy them some time to start coming up with answers. In other words, it wasn’t just Donald Trump. Or the Russians. Or James Comey. Or all the problems with how Clinton and her aides ran the campaign. Win or lose, Democrats were facing an existential crisis in the years ahead—the result of years of complacency, ignoring the withering of the grass roots and the state parties, sitting by as Republicans racked up local win after local win.
“The patient,” says Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, “was clearly already sick.”
As Trump takes over the GOP and starts remaking its new identity as a nationalist, populist party, creating a new political pole in American politics for the first time in generations, all eyes are on the Democrats. How will they confront a suddenly awakened, and galvanized, white majority? What’s to stop Trump from doing whatever he wants? Who’s going to pull a coherent new vision together? Worried liberals are watching with trepidation, fearful that Trump is just the beginning of worse to come, desperate for a comeback strategy that can work.
Socialism sounds great. It has always sounded great. And it will probably always continue to sound great. It is only when you go beyond rhetoric, and start looking at hard facts, that socialism turns out to be a big disappointment, if not a disaster.
While throngs of young people are cheering loudly for avowed socialist Bernie Sanders, socialism has turned oil-rich Venezuela into a place where there are shortages of everything from toilet paper to beer, where electricity keeps shutting down, and where there are long lines of people hoping to get food, people complaining that they cannot feed their families.
With national income going down, and prices going up under triple-digit inflation in Venezuela, these complaints are by no means frivolous. But it is doubtful if the young people cheering for Bernie Sanders have even heard of such things, whether in Venezuela or in other countries around the world that have turned their economies over to politicians and bureaucrats to run.
The anti-capitalist policies in Venezuela have worked so well that the number of companies in Venezuela is now a fraction of what it once was. That should certainly reduce capitalist “exploitation,” shouldn’t it?
But people who attribute income inequality to capitalists exploiting workers, as Karl Marx claimed, never seem to get around to testing that belief against facts — such as the fact that none of the Marxist regimes around the world has ever had as high a standard of living for working people as there is in many capitalist countries.
Facts are seldom allowed to contaminate the beautiful vision of the left. What matters to the true believers are the ringing slogans, endlessly repeated.
Ridgewood NJ, American young people, who helped make Bernie Sanders a contender if not a winner in the Democratic Party’s primary, may play a critical role in the general election.
But as they cast their ballots, millennials might want to seek direction from the Founding Fathers.
“In 2008, we hoped for the future,” says Alexander G. Markovsky, author of Liberal Bolshevism: America Did Not Defeat Communism, She Adopted It. “In 2016, we hope for the past.”
That may be especially important for young people – some of whom will be voting in a presidential election for the first time – because they have inherited a nation that has evolved in ways the Founding Fathers wouldn’t have envisioned, Markovsky says.
He says messages the Founding Fathers might have for millennials include:
• Inequality is the locomotive of progress. Economic equality and justice sound so appealing that the true believers do not even realized that economic equality is in itself an intrinsically unjust concept. “The source of all wealth is the product of man’s God-given ability to innovate,” Markovsky says. This intellectual ability is a property of the individual and has not been given equally; therefore it wouldn’t be reasonable to expect equal results from unequal abilities. Furthermore, the Founding Fathers had envisioned America built on a foundation of economic freedom and equal opportunities and never addressed inequality in any of the documents they have created. “The Founding Fathers saw America as prosperous and wealthy country and recognized that economic equality and wealth are mutually exclusive,” Markovsky says.
• Job creation. Political debates focused on job creation are a result of lack of understanding of the free market economy. “The purpose of capitalism is not job creation. The purpose of the capitalist economy is to create wealth. Employment and the subsequent distribution of the spoils of an economy are by-products of capitalism,” Markovsky says.
• The 17th Amendment drastically changed how we’re governed. The 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is perhaps the best example of why the younger generation is inheriting is not the United States the Founding Fathers intended, Markovsky says. The House of Representatives was intended to be a “People’s House,” with representatives directly elected by the people in their respective districts. Senators were to be selected by state legislatures to represent the states and ensure their sovereignty.
The Seventeenth Amendment ratified in 1913 established the direct election of U.S. senators by popular vote. This effectively took power from the states, making a mockery of the original intent of the United States Constitution and de facto nullifying the 10th Amendment, rendering it unenforceable. With the ratification of the 17th Amendment the balance of power so carefully constructed by the Founders shifted irrevocably in favor of the federal government at the expense of the states’ sovereignty. With passage of the 17th Amendment, the Senate lost not only its original intended purpose; it became redundant at best and an impediment at worst. Paraphrasing Churchill, “Never has so much been surrendered by so many to so few.”
Markovsky understands if young people are unhappy about their choices in this year’s presidential election. However, the choices of these elections should not be between the individuals and their respective vices, but between potential restoration of the Constitutional principle or further expansion of the Federal Government, subversion of the Constitution and tyranny. As Markovsky pointed out in his book, government by its very nature is an institution of tyranny, a phenomenon the Founding Fathers were well aware of and they designed our Constitution to protect citizens from governmental oppression.
Perhaps that’s something that a combination of the millennial spirit and the Founding Fathers’ vision can provide.
About Alexander G. Markovsky
Alexander G. Markovsky, author of Liberal Bolshevism: America Did Not Defeat Communism, She Adopted It, was born in the Soviet Union and now lives in Houston, Texas. He holds degrees in economics and political science from the University of Marxism-Leninism. He is a contributor to FamilySecurityMatters.org and his work also appears on RedState.com and WorldNetDaily.com.
WikiLeaks hack reveals DNC’s favoritism as Clinton staff in damage control over Hillary’s support for DOMA
By Michael Sainato • 10/10/16 2:47pm
On October 10, Wikileaks released part two of their emails from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta.
Friday, Wikileaks released their first batch of Podesta’s emails, which included excerpts from Clinton’s Wall Street transcripts that reaffirmed why Clinton refused to release them in full. During the second presidential debate, Clinton confirmed their authenticity by attempting to defend one statement she made in the speech about having a public and private stance on political issues. She cited Abraham Lincoln, a defense comparable to her ridiculous invocation of 9/11 when pressed on her ties to Wall Street during a Democratic primary debate.
Three top staffers are leaving the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in a staff shakeup spurred by the leak of damaging emails about the primary battle between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.
The CEO of the DNC, Amy Dacey, is departing, as are communications director Luis Miranda and chief financial officer Brad Marshall, the DNC announced in a statement.
Donna Brazile, who is taking the reins of the DNC following the resignation of Debbie Wasserman Schultz (R-Fla.) as chairwoman, made no mention of the email scandal in her statement, mostly thanking the departing staffers for their service.
“Thanks in part to the hard work of Amy, Luis, and Brad, the Democratic Party has adopted the most progressive platform in history, has put itself in financial position to win in November, and has begun the important work of investing in state party partnerships,” Brazile said in a statement.
“I’m so grateful for their commitment to this cause, and I wish them continued success in the next chapter of their career.”
But it’s clear that the DNC is trying to turn the page from the disastrous leak of nearly 20,000 stolen emails, which appeared to show officials at the committee plotting against Sanders’s presidential campaign.
Those messages, published by WikiLeaks just days before the Democratic convention, caused a political firestorm.
The uproar from supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) continued on Tuesdayas demonstrators took to the streets in Center City. Though the crowds had thinned after Monday’s mob outside of City Hall, the heat was still scorching and some protestors were still holding out for Sanders delegates at the Democratic National Convention to walk out in support of Green Party candidate Jill Stein rather than vote for Hillary Clinton. JT Aregood, PolitickerNJ Read more
By Theodore Schleifer, Eugene Scott and Jeff Zeleny, CNN
(CNN)The head of the Democratic National Committee will not speak at the party’s convention next week, a decision reached by party officials Saturday after emails surfaced that raised questions about the committee’s impartiality during the Democratic primary.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, whose stewardship of the DNC has been under fire through most of the presidential primary process, will not have a major speaking role in an effort “to keep the peace” in the party, a Democrat familiar with the decision said. The revelation comes following the release of nearly 20,000 emails
One email appears to show DNC staffers asking how they can reference Bernie Sanders’ faith to weaken him in the eyes of Southern voters. Another seems to depict an attorney advising the committee on how to defend Hillary Clinton against an accusation by the Sanders campaign of not living up to a joint fundraising agreement.
Wasserman Schultz is expected to gavel the convention in and out, but not speak in the wake of the controversy surrounding the leaked emails, a top Democrat said.
“She’s been quarantined,” another top Democrat said, following a meeting Saturday night.
A top staffer at the Democratic National Committee has apologized after suggesting that the organization use Bernie Sanders’ religious beliefs against him in the Democratic primary.
One email among the thousands of internal DNC messages released this week by Wikileaks showed DNC CFO Brad Marshall questioning Sanders’ Jewish faith, and suggested that painting the candidate as an atheist “could make several points difference” in several late primary contests.
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“It might may (sic) no difference, but for KY and WVA can we get someone to ask his belief. Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist,” Marshall wrote in a message to several DNC communications directors.
The message does not mention Sanders by name, but he was the only Jewish candidate, and the email came shortly before the Kentucky and West Virginia Democratic primaries.
(CNN)Nearly 20,000 emails sent and received by Democratic National Committee staff members were released Friday by Wikileaks, with one message in particular raising questions about the committee’s impartiality during the Democratic primary.
The revelation threatened to shatter the uneasy peace between the Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders camps and supporters days before the Democratic convention kicks off next week.
The leaks, from January 2015 to May 2016, feature Democratic staffers debating everything from how to deal with challenging media requests to coordinating the committee’s message with other powerful interests in Washington.
The emails were leaked from the accounts of seven DNC officials, Wikileaks said. CNN has not independently established the emails’ authenticity
Hillary Clinton’s popularity has slumped in California under an unrelenting challenge from Bernie Sanders, who has succeeded in breaching the demographic wall Clinton had counted on to protect her in the state’s presidential primary, a new USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll has found.
As he has done across the country this primary season, Sanders commands the support of younger voters by huge margins in advance of Tuesday’s primary — even among Latinos and Asians, voter groups that Clinton easily won when she ran eight years ago. Many of his backers come from a large pool of voters who have registered for the first time in the weeks before the election.
With national attention focused on the role of superdelegates in picking candidates, a federal lawsuit filed in Trenton this month sheds light on how voting is conducted at closed local party conventions and how it can escalate political infighting. Jan Hefler, Inquire
