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Feel the Bern: Feds looking into Comrade Bernie Sanders, wife Jane over real estate deal

Bernie Sanders
June 28,2017
the staff of the Ridgewood blog

The Socialist Utopia of  Vt. , Federal investigators are now looking into the finances behind a real estate deal for a now-defunct college put together by the wife of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders. Comrade Sanders has confirmed on Monday she has hired a lawyer to look after her interests.

The investigation, first reported by the news website Vtdigger.com, is looking into allegations that Jane O’Meara Sanders made fraudulent claims and promises while seeking $10 million in financing for the real estate deal.

The complaint against Comrade Jane Sanders was filed in early 2016 by attorney Brady Toensing, who served as the Vermont campaign chairman for Donald Trump during his run for president as a Republican. In a separate complaint, Toensing alleged that Bernie Sanders’ senatorial office pressured a bank to approve the loan.

Back in 2010, Comrade Jane Sanders was president of the tiny Burlington College when she brokered a $10 million deal for the college to buy the last undeveloped parcel of land in Burlington on the Lake Champlain waterfront made up of 32 acres overlooking the lake and the 77,000-square-foot former orphanage and administrative offices of Vermont’s Roman Catholic Church, which needed the money to settle a series of priest sex abuse cases.

Then in January 2016, Toensing filed a complaint with the Vermont office of the U.S. attorney and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. He alleged a loan used by the college to buy the land “involved the overstatement and misrepresentation of nearly $2 million … in what were purported to be confirmed contributions and grants to the college.”

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‘You Broke My Heart’: Supporters of Bernie Sanders React to Endorsement

Bernie Sanders

By ALAN RAPPEPORTJULY 12, 2016

Senator Bernie Sanders offered a full-throated endorsement of Hillary Clinton on Tuesday, urging his supporters to get behind the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. But many of his most loyal followers are not feeling it just yet.

Disappointment in Mr. Sanders cascaded across the internet as he embraced his former rival, describing her as a comrade in the fight to overhaul a rigged campaign finance system and lift the poor out of poverty. The sadness was most evident on the Facebook page where the Vermont senator explained his decision in a message titled “Forever forward” that drew responses infused with a skeptical refrain: Never Hillary.

“You broke my heart and betrayed the left Senator Sanders,” wrote Cesar Agusto Diaz, a Sanders supporter from New York.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/13/us/politics/bernie-sanders-reaction.html?_r=0

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SANDERS PREDICTS DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION WILL BE CONTESTED

Bernie Sanders

BY KEN THOMAS
ASSOCIATED PRESS

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Nearing the end of the primary season, a defiant Bernie Sanders predicted Saturday that the Democratic presidential process would lead to a contested summer convention against Hillary Clinton, pushing back against the likelihood that the former secretary of state will soon declare victory.

Speaking to reporters three days before the California primary, Sanders showed few signs of surrender, vowing to take his bid to the Philadelphia convention in July. He urged news organizations not to anoint Clinton as the presumptive nominee through a combination of pledged delegates and superdelegates.

“It is extremely unlikely that Secretary Clinton will have the requisite number of pledged delegates to claim victory on Tuesday night,” Sanders said. “Now I have heard reports that Secretary Clinton has said it’s all going to be over on Tuesday night. I have reports that the media, after the New Jersey results come in, are going to declare that it is all over. That simply is not accurate.”

By nightfall, Sanders was rallying supporters outside the entrance of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, where he pointed to his differences with Clinton on super PACs, the federal minimum wage and the Iraq War.

https://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_DEM_2016_SANDERS_FUTURE?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2016-06-04-12-55-53

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Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton in a tight race in California as the campaign batters her popularity

hillary-clinton-what-difference-does-it-make

by Cathleen Decker

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.

https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-latimes-presidential-primary-poll-20160602-snap-story.html

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Dems’ new fear: Sanders revolt could upend Democratic convention

Bernie Sanders

By Manu Raju, Senior Political Reporter

Updated 4:53 PM ET, Tue May 17, 2016

(CNN)Sen. Barbara Boxer, a veteran of Democratic politics, says she never saw anything quite like this before.

Loud cursing, shouting, obscene gestures and vile insults, including crude comments about the female anatomy. It was all on display over the weekend as supporters of Bernie Sanders turned the Nevada State Democratic Convention into chaos.

“I was not able to stop these people for doing what they did,” Boxer, a Hillary Clinton supporter, told CNN. “Apparently they’ve done it before. …. This group of about 100 were very vocal, and I can’t describe it — disrespectful doesn’t even explain it, it was worse than that.”

https://www.cnn.com/2016/05/17/politics/democrat-bernie-sanders-revolt/

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Welcome to a Bernie Sanders Wiccan ritual

Salem-witches

Attending a rally for Bernie Sanders usually involves long lines and security screenings, but that wasn’t the case at an intimate, informal event Friday evening supporting the Vermont senator’s presidential campaign in a park here.

Instead of metal detectors, entrance required burning ceremonial sweetgrass.

Participants were “smudged,” meaning the smoke from the sweetgrass was wafted over them before they could enter the sacred circle and begin a Wiccan ritual to support Sanders ahead of Oregon’s primary on Tuesday.

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“Welcome to the ‘Feeling the Bern ritual,’” Leigha Lafleur, 41, told the gathering  as she prepared to lead them in the “amplification of positive energy of Bernie Sanders and the progressive movement.”

https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-sanders-prayer-circle-20160514-snap-story.html

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Some Sanders supporters say it’s ‘Bernie or Bust’ and they will never vote for Hillary Clinton

Bernie Sanders

Hunter Walker
National Correspondent
March 26, 2016

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders greets his supporters at a rally in Seattle last week. (Photo: David Ryder/Reuters)
Bernie Sanders has dubbed his presidential campaign a “political revolution,” but some of his supporters are rebelling against the very party he is hoping to lead.

A voluble group of die-hard Sanders backers is vowing online that it’s “Bernie or Bust,” saying they will never support his presidential primary opponent — and, at this point, the likely Democratic nominee — Hillary Clinton.

Nearly two months after voting began in the Democratic primaries, Clinton has racked up a lead among pledged party delegates that makes a Sanders victory increasingly implausible. In apparent recognition of this mathematical challenge and the need to begin aiming fire outside the party, Sanders in recent weeks has pivoted away from Clinton and toward Republican frontrunner Donald Trump. Yet at the same time Sanders is making the case that he’s actually more electable in a matchup with Trump, he has also started talking about the circumstances under which he would endorse Clinton. His senior adviser, Tad Devine, has even suggested that Sanders would consider serving as Clinton’s running mate.

https://www.yahoo.com/politics/some-sanders-supporters-say-its-bernie-or-bust-155205844.html

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Sanders camp suspicious of Microsoft’s influence in Iowa Caucus

Bernie Sanders

01/27/16 06:05 PM—UPDATED 01/28/16 12:56 PM

By Alex Seitz-Wald

DES MOINES, Iowa – The campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is raising questions about the involvement of Microsoft in the Iowa Caucuses, now just days away, and has built a independent system to check the official results.

For the first time this year, Microsoft partnered with the Iowa Democratic and Republican Parties to provide a technology platform with which the parties will run their caucuses. The software giant created separate mobile apps for each party, which officials at hundreds of caucuses across the state will use to report out results from individual precincts to party headquarters for tabulation.

The arrangement has aroused the suspicions of aides to Sanders, whose regularly warns that corporate power and the billionaire class are trying to hijack democracy. Pete D’Alessandro, who is running the Iowa portion of Sanders’ campaign, questioned the motives of the major multinational corporation in an interview with MSNBC: “You’d have to ask yourself why they’d want to give something like that away for free.”

The Sanders campaign has built their own reporting system to check the results from the official Microsoft-backed app. It has trained its precinct captain on using the app, which is designed to be as user friendly as possible, and the campaign will also staff a hotline system as further redundancy.

“It’s just a way that our folks can have an app that we trust to get the numbers to us in a timely fashion,” D’Alessandro said. “I’m always going to be more for sure on the stuff that my people had control over the entire time… If there are any problems, we can spot them right away.”

Other Sanders aides noted that Microsoft employees have donated several hundred thousand dollars to Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton over her career, and questioned why the Iowa Democratic Party didn’t partner with a software company based in Iowa.

https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/sanders-campaign-suspicious-corporate-influence-iowa-caucus

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Dick Morris: If Hillary loses

Bernie Sanders

By Dick Morris – 01/19/16 04:56 PM EST

The contrast between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, startlingly evident in their debate Sunday night, could not be clearer. While devotees of the establishment can tell themselves that Clinton held her own, it is clear she did not.

Sanders had all the passion, anger, force and emotion on his side, and the best Clinton could do was to try to keep it in the park as her rival hit ball after ball. Since primaries are about motivation in getting out the vote, the Vermont senator has it all over Clinton.

So what happens if she:

(a) loses Iowa;
(b) loses New Hampshire;
(c) falls behind Sanders in the national polls and Donald Trump or Ted Cruz in the head-to-heads?

The Democratic howls of concern will be deafening. “She’s blowing it again,” will be the least of what they will say. Democrats will feel trapped with a candidate who is showing before their eyes that she cannot even win a primary, much less a general election.

https://thehill.com/opinion/dick-morris/266361-dick-morris-if-hillary-loses

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Panic: Clinton Campaign Underestimated Sanders Strengths, Allies Say

Bernie Sanders

By PATRICK HEALYJAN. 16, 2016

Advisers to Hillary Clinton, including former President Bill Clinton, believe that her campaign made serious miscalculations by forgoing early attacks on Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and failing to undercut his archliberal message before it grew into a political movement that has now put him within striking distance of beating Mrs. Clinton in Iowa and New Hampshire.

According to Democrats close to the Clintons and involved with her campaign, Mrs. Clinton and the former president are also unnerved by the possibility that Mr. Sanders will foment a large wave of first-time voters and liberals that will derail her in Iowa, not unlike Barack Obama’s success in 2008, which consigned Mrs. Clinton to a third-place finish. They have asked her advisers about the strength of the campaign’s data modeling and turnout assumptions in Iowa, given that her 2008 campaign’s predictions were so inaccurate.

As the Democratic rivals prepare for what is likely to be a contentious televised debate on Sunday night, the Clintons are particularly concerned that her “rational message,” in the words of an aide, is not a fit with a restless Democratic primary electorate. Allies and advisers of the Clintons say Mr. Sanders is clearly connecting with voters through his emotional, inspiring rallying cry that the American economic and political systems are rigged for the wealthy and powerful. By contrast, Mrs. Clinton has beenstressing her electability and questioning the costs of Mr. Sanders’s ideas.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/us/politics/hillary-clinton-regrets-not-attacking-bernie-sanders-earlier-her-allies-say.html?_r=0

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Feel the Bern Sanders and Clinton Neck-And-Neck 2016 Races in Iowa, New Hampshire

Bernie Sanders

by MARK MURRAY

Three weeks until the first presidential nominating contest, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are running neck and neck in Iowa, while Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are also locked in a tight race in the Hawkeye State.

What’s more, Clinton and Sanders are within the margin of error in New Hampshire, while Trump has built a 16-point lead in the same state.

Those are the results of two brand-new NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist polls – the first NBC/WSJ/Marist early-state surveys of 2016, which for the first time measure likely voters.

https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/poll-neck-neck-2016-races-iowa-new-hampshire-n493361