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Bernie Sanders, Union-Buster

While Hillary Clinton quickly secured endorsements from a slew of large labor organizations in 2015, more than a dozen local and regional union groups have broken with their national leadership and voted to support Bernie Sanders instead.

Many of the Clinton endorsements were decided by national executive boards, which are often small groups of professionals based in Washington, D.C. Sanders has largely won his support among locals, as well as at regional committees.

That's the only possible takeaway from the ongoing back and forth between Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts over whether the former told the latter that he did not believe a woman could be elected president in 2020. And the feud got worse, not better, during -- and after -- Tuesday night's Iowa debate.

Warren was then asked what her reaction was to what Sanders had said back in 2018. "I disagreed," she said. "Bernie is my friend, and I am not here to try to fight with Bernie. But, look, this question about whether or not a woman can be president has been raised, and it's time for us to attack it head-on."

On the other side of the argument, Third Way senior vice president Lanae Erickson tweeted this of the Sanders-Warren handshake-that-wasn't: "That moment when the dude who called himself a "feminist" on his profile shows his true colors on date 5...You hate to see it."

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is encouraging rapper Cardi B to run for political office, the latest exchange of compliments and support between the unlikely duo.

"Cardi B is deeply concerned about what's happening in the country. She knows what it's like to live in poverty and struggle, and it would be great for her to bring that experience to politics" Sanders told TMZ in an interview posted Tuesday.

The pair teamed up in July to film a campaign video discussing the cancellation of student debt, the climate crisis and raising the minimum wage in an effort to appeal to young voters.

They sent Hillary and Bill Clinton's daughter Chelsea out on behalf of her mother to bash Senator Bernie Sanders on the issue of health care.

But when it's the first time (as this was for Clinton the younger), the surrogate should be sure whereof she speaks, and had better stick to talking about her candidate, not the opponent

Unfortunately, Chelsea Clinton misrepresented Senator Sanders' position, and her premiere performance on the stump backfired, producing a flood of political donations to Sanders.

Elizabeth Warren sought to "raise a concern" with Bernie Sanders during a tense onstage discussion immediately following Tuesday night's debate, according to Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir.

And on Monday, Warren said Sanders told her during a private 2018 meeting that a woman could not win the presidency. Sanders has repeatedly denied having made any such comment while Warren has held firm in saying that he did -- and that she "disagreed."Read MoreThe only witness within earshot of the post-debate conversation was fellow candidate Tom Steyer, who told reporters afterward that he did not hear what the two were discussing and -- sensing what he described as an "awkward moment" -- sought to get out of the way.

"Anybody who knows me, knows that it's incomprehensible that I would think that a woman could not be president to the United States," he said. "Go to YouTube today. They have some video of me 30 years ago talking about how a woman could become president of the United States."

Here's how it happened: Steyer, a wealthy businessman who is self-funding his bid for the Democratic nomination, had just finished up debating with five of his rivals. What better way to cap the night than say your goodbyes to your new friends, right? Mind as well stroll over to Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders having a little chat- OH WAIT OH MY GOD NO.

As Sanders and Warren each accused the other of calling them a liar, there's good ole Tom Steyer just kind of standing there. Awkwardly. Actually, "awkwardly" doesn't capture it. What does capture it? Maybe this: You go out to dinner with a married couple you're friends with. As you walk up to the table, they are just finishing up a VERY heated argument. Cue loud chair scraping as you sit down and say: "I don't want to get in the middle. I just want to say hi, Bernie."

Oh wait. That's actually exactly what Steyer said in an attempt to extricate himself from the world's most uncomfortable situation. Which honestly isn't all that bad given that he was coming up with it on the fly and had to be flustered by the whole you're-a-liar-no-you're-the-liar thing he was witnessing play out between Sanders and Warren. Sanders, because he is Sanders and also because he was likely somewhat flustered by the Warren confrontation, offered Steyer this: "Yeah, good, OK." Oomph.

when it comes to foreign policy, there is little question that Sanders is closer to Obama’s sensibility than is Clinton.

The campaign rhetoric exposes a significant divergence in perspective. Both Sanders and Obama opposed President George W. Bush’s catastrophic war of choice in Iraq. Clinton voted for it and defended her vote for years. That was, as Sanders repeats, not just a calamitous case of bad judgment; it also reflects differing worldviews.

Clinton, as Vice President Biden noted, is by temperament an “interventionist.” She believes the United States is an “indispensable nation,” that, in Biden’s phrasing, “we just have to do something when bad people do bad things,” whether our vital interests are involved or not. Leading neoconservatives such as Robert Kagan (a Post contributor) who touted the Iraq War declare themselves “comfortable” with Clinton’s views. “If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue,” Kagan said in June 2014, “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.”

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, is endorsing Bernie Sanders for president

Jayapal's decision means Sanders now has the backing of both CPC co-chairs

Jayapal, representing Washington state, is the lead sponsor of the House "Medicare for All" bill and had been courted by both Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren

On Morning Joe Wednesday morning, Donald Trump explained his — and Bernie Sanders’s — big wins in New Hampshire this way: “We’re being ripped off by everybody. And I guess that’s the thing that Bernie Sanders and myself have in common

We’re being ripped off, and Trump and Sanders are the only two candidates who are really saying that. They are speaking to people’s sense that our economic and political systems are cheating them, that they are being failed because the underlying rules of those systems have themselves been rigged.

In one sentence, Sanders blamed flat wages and soaring inequality on an economy whose rules have been written to benefit a tiny elite at the expense of everyone else, and tied this directly to a political system whose rules have been written to dis-empower the American people from doing anything about it.

Bernie Sanders is mad as hell -- and he's hoping Democratic voters are, too.

Hillary Clinton tied herself tightly with President Barack Obama and argued she'd build on his legacy, as the Democratic presidential contenders clashed Sunday night in Charleston.

Sanders = Trump

He volunteered for Gary Hart, the Colorado senator who was the party frontrunner for 1988 until scandal brought him down. Entering elected politics himself, O’Malley was the mayor of Baltimore from 1999 to 2007 and the governor of Maryland from 2008 to 2015. He aimed at the White House as a happy warrior, a guitar-playing politico with a record of progressive policy achievement.

A few days before Iowa votes again, O’Malley walks a few blocks from his Washington office. The room is quiet, the table discreet. The national stage is not. Over at the Capitol, in the impeachment trial, Donald Trump is on his way to acquittal.

never

A big story of the Democratic primaries is the rise of the so-called pragmatic black voters who revived former Vice President Joe Biden's flagging presidential campaign. But there's a flip side to this story that no one is paying attention to: What happened to all those radical black voters who should be rallying to Sen. Bernie Sanders' side?

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a socialist, according to many historians.  W.E.B. DuBois was a socialist,  and so were civil rights leaders A. Philip Randolph and  Bayard Rustin. The most prominent black philosopher today,  Cornel West,  is a socialist and Sanders' supporter. Hip-hop artists, such as rapper "Killer Mike" and Chuck D of Public Enemy, are also big Sanders supporters. Read More .pg.t-light .zn-body-text h3 { text-align: center; font-weight: 900; } @media screen and (min-width: 640px) { .zn-body-text h3:not(.el__headline):not(.cd__headline):before { margin: 60px auto 10px; } } There is  arguably no group in America that should be more suspicious of unfettered capitalism than blacks. Slavery, for example, was driven as much by greed as racism. And blacks lost half  of their wealth due to the 2008

"You can't have capitalism without racism," Malcolm X once  said.

obscured an important schism within the Democratic Party: between the older voters who carried Mr. Biden to victory and the younger voters who overwhelmingly rejected him.

“I say to the Democratic establishment: In order to win in the future, you need to win the voters who represent the future of our country,” Mr. Sanders said. “You must speak to the issues of concern to them. You cannot simply be satisfied by winning the votes of people who are older.”

But Mr. Biden has been campaigning for nearly a year to represent a party that young voters often prefer, and his lack of support among those voters has been evident for a long time.

Biden praises Sanders on income inequality, calls Clinton 'relatively new' to the fight

anders has sufficiently come around on the issue of gun control, Biden said, even as the Clinton campaign continued to launch withering criticism of Sanders' past vote allowing legal immunity for gun manufacturers

he suggested Clinton was a newcomer to issues like the growing gap between rich and poor.

Sanders delivered a Washington speech explaining, in effect, that socialism is as American as a piece of frozen apple pie with a slice of processed cheese. Doing so, however, he demonstrated that “socialism” is a classification that no longer classifies.

What Sanders then offered as forward-looking socialism was a warmed-over version of what President Franklin D. Roosevelt advocated 75 years ago.

Sanders says “what I mean by democratic socialism” is “economic rights are human rights.”

But over the past six weeks, this coverage has shifted to mirror pro-Sanders talking points first used in the last presidential campaign, said Clint Watts of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, who has been monitoring Russian interference continuously. "What's really come on strong just in the last 30 to 45 days are very similar narratives that we saw in 2016 about Sanders," Watts told NPR.

While Sanders has acknowledged on the campaign trail that he was briefed by the intelligence community about Russia's efforts to boost his campaign, he has been steadfastly opposed to that support, saying at a recent debate: "Hey, Mr. Putin, if I'm president of the United States, trust me, you're not going to interfere in any more American elections."

A statement signed by top Trump administration officials stressed that foreign actors were spreading "false information and propaganda about political processes and candidates on social media in hopes to cause confusion and create doubt in our system." That includes an ever-changing number of candidates and topics based on Russian strategic goals, including reportedly the reelection of President Trump. Following the 2016 presidential election, the intelligence community devoted a substantial portion of its assessment on Russian meddling to RT's efforts to influence politics and fuel divisions in the United States.

As the Democratic race has become a two-man contest between Biden and Sanders, multiple sources say. Trump has been frustrated by the former vice president's comeback. That was evident in the call the campaign held Sunday night — something they now say they will do so periodically until November — as officials contended that electing Biden is the same as electing Sanders.

While Sanders has energized the progressive wing, Biden has focused on rallying centrists around him, and both have argued they are better suited to defeat Trump.

A primary concern for the Trump campaign if Biden is the nominee will be how he performs in states that are critical to the President's re-election like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. But publicly, the campaign insisted Biden wouldn't be competitive with Trump in those states and discounted his blue-collar appeal during the call, arguing his past positions on trade have damaged him.

"And if Joe is the candidate, I'll do everything I can to make sure that he does (win)," Sanders said.

"Well, I'm not going to speculate. We would love to have Sen. Warren's support and we would love to have the millions of people who supported Sen. Warren in her campaign on board," Sanders said.

"We're working as hard as we can because Michigan is very, very significant in terms of the primary process. We hope to repeat the victory we had in 2016," he said, adding later that he thinks his proposed agenda will help him claim another victory in the state.

Mr. Sanders fits into a strain of American socialism that has largely eschewed ideology, made few references to Karl Marx, and been more likely to talk about fairness and values than about economic theory.

He does not sound like the doctrinaire immigrant socialists of the 19th century, for example. He is somewhat closer to Norman Thomas and the socialists of the 1930s or Eugene Debs and the socialism of the early 20th century. But both men headed a socialist party, which Mr. Sanders does not

The socialists Mr. Sanders most resembles were Gilded Age intellectuals, reformers, union members and ordinary citizens who self-labeled as socialist.

After months of internal hand wringing, the Democratic Party’s biggest financial backers have flocked to former Vice President Joe Biden. And Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Senator running as the scourge of the elite, is trying to turn it against him.

As the Democratic presidential race shifts into a two-person contest, two campaigns with two very different funding models are now being put to the test: Biden’s bid backed by longtime Democratic donors and bundlers who have now united behind him, and the massive grassroots movement of small-dollar donations that has fueled Sanders. In a sense, the dueling models are a microcosm of the competing visions for the Democratic Party itself: whether it will continue operating under the status quo, or shift towards the grassroots-led model the progressive wing has been pushing for years. Whoever prevails will not just get the party’s nomination, but could possibly determine its future financial model.

“The folks who, for a long period of time would not give me money for the campaign because they did not think [Biden] was going to be the leading candidate turned — particularly turned when Pete [Buttigieg] and Amy [Klobuchar] came on board and since [Michael] Bloomberg dropped out,” says attorney Stephen Cozen, founder of the law firm Cozen O’Connor and a Philadelphia-based Biden donor who has been raising money since he entered the race. “I’ve had a tremendous influx of contributions to the campaign from people who have said ‘You were right all along.'”