Last Call For Dilma's Brazil

There were massive protests across Brazil's major cities on Sunday calling for the impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rouseff. Things just got real in Rio.

Hundreds of thousands of Brazilians gathered on Sunday to protest political corruption, a weak economy, and to call for the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff on a day that could build momentum for efforts to oust her.

Demonstrators wearing shirts with the green and yellow colors of Brazil’s flag and carrying banners calling for Rousseff’s ouster filled the streets of cities across the country. They marched beside Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana beach, toward Congress in the capital Brasilia, and down Sao Paulo’s Avenida Paulista. The atmosphere in most cities was festive, though, and free of the violence that some feared if there were confrontations between opposing political groups.

Initial estimates indicated turnout was higher than in similar demonstrations in December, when about 100,000 took to the streets nationwide. On Sunday, about 100,000 people marched in Brasilia alone, according to the Military Police, with several thousand participating in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo.

Ronaldo Cappellesso, a 45-year-old store owner in Brasilia, said it feels like the country has reached a tipping point, with many of his friends protesting for the first time. “Finally I feel that impeachment is actually going to happen,” he said. “Anything is better than what we have now.”

Many Brazilians say they have had enough after enduring the worst recession in decades and a rolling corruption scandal known as Lava Jato, or Carwash in English, that has ensnared multiple politicians and business executives. The outpouring of public sentiment may be decisive for legislators debating whether to remain loyal to the president or join a swelling opposition seeking her ouster, as former allies begin to discuss political solutions for a post-Rousseff Brazil.

The political spectacle is playing out less than five months before the 2016 Olympic Games, the first awarded to a South American country, are due to start in Rio de Janeiro.

I honestly don't know if the Games will go on and I don't think they should, but that's another matter. Rouseff's government is thoroughly corrupt, Brazil's economy is in freefall and the cries for her ouster will only get louder.  Several administration officials are turning states' evidence and it looks like Rouseff will be gone sooner rather than later.

We'll see where this goes.

Zandar's Hometown Blues

To my everlasting shame, The Donald will be holding a rally in the city where I grew up tomorrow, and I'd like to think the people there would run him out of Hickory on a rail.  No such luck.

Donald Trump is scheduled to hold a campaign event at Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory on Monday.

Trump’s campaign on Friday requested to use the university’s P.E. Monroe Auditorium at 10 a.m. Monday, the university said in a statement on its website.

The campaign added the appearance to its website on Saturday afternoon and said doors will open at 7 a.m to Monday’s event.Tickets are available online at www.donaldjtrump.com.

“Given appropriate assurances of security, LR will honor this request,” the university said.

“LR in no way endorses this or any other candidate,” Lenoir-Rhyne President Wayne Powell said in the statement. “However, as part of our commitment to the American political process, we welcome the event and hope it will inspire people to engage in dialog about the values that are so important to our nation. We also hope it will help inspire everyone to vote.”

Sure.  Look, if I'm Trump, I couldn't think of a better North Carolina rally location than Hickory. We make furniture and fiber optic cable, because the big GE electrical transformer plant moved to Mexico 15 years ago and the textile mills went to China before that.  The Germans moved in with tool and die gears and abrasives a while back, so the city has manufacturing, but unemployment here went from under two percent during the boom years in the late 90's to 15% ten years later.  It's gotten down to 6% now but things haven't been the same since.  People remember those times and then it got tough.

And they blame Obama.

Even though it's North Carolina, the place is 85% white.  These are exactly the voters Trump wants to reach, so I can't blame him for coming here.  The big tech industries went right on past here to Charlotte or Research Triangle Park.  We made number 5 in the most miserable cities in America last year.  Hell, I saw the writing on the wall and left ten years ago. The economy here is awful. Only one in six people in the area has a college degree.

These are Trump's people.  It just depresses me to be so starkly reminded of it.  They will love him here.

And I hate it.  Zandardad says he'll be there protesting.

Stay safe, pop.

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/article65686422.html#storylink=cpy

When You've Lost Yggy...

Vox's Matthew Yglesias finally gets it through his thick head that Trump isn't "funny" or "delightfully chaotic" or "what the Republicans need in order to clean out the pool drain" but that he is truly dangerous and that his rhetoric is going to get someone hurt or killed.

I was a liberal Donald Trump apologist. Not a liberal enjoying the chaos Trump was sowing in the Republican Party, but someone who welcomed his ideological heterodoxy as a step away from the cliff of endless polarization that offered a more moderate substantive agenda than Marco Rubio's. I held on to that conviction through Friday's protest violence and Saturday's torrent of "enough is enough"takes.

I was wrong. Sunday morning, in the context of what he knew to be a growing controversy about violent behavior on the part of his supporters, Trump tweeted what can really only be interpreted as a threat to send goons to beat up Bernie Sanders supporters.

.

Bernie Sanders is lying when he says his disruptors aren't told to go to my events. Be careful Bernie, or my supporters will go to yours!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2016

.

He then followed this up by suggesting that he would use the resources at his disposal to help his supporters obtain immunity from legal consequence for violent acts they undertook on his behalf.

There are those of us that had Trump pegged as a Father Charles Coughlin-style demagogue from the beginning, a vessel to make acceptable the rancor and the hatred that infests the Republican party and has been clearly on display nationally since Barack Obama became President and well before that regionally with the likes of assholes like GOP Sen. Jesse Helms, the national shame I grew up with as a North Carolinian.

I'm glad that Yggy here has finally seen the light.  But he should have been denouncing this jackass nine months ago, where Trump should have been run out of the party instead of being enabled by Yglesias and the Village because Trump somehow represented the "legitimate and very real grievances of working-class white men", with folks telling themselves that Trump would "moderate" in the general and couldn't possibly be as awful as his critics were warning us:

There have been clear signs all year that this was the direction the Trump phenomenon was heading, but I assumed that as he got closer to the Republican nomination Trump would tone down his extreme behavior in order to demonstrate his acceptability to mainstream voters. In fact, he has done the opposite. It's a surprising decision that has truly scary implications for how he might behave were he to actually win the presidency.

He was worse.  Now he may be President. Was it worth your professional reputation to say "Hey guys maybe he's not so bad", Matt? Because my question is if you're making judgment calls this badly, exactly why should we listen to you in the future?

Sunday Long Read: Obama Looks Back

Needless to say, your Sunday Long Read this week is Jeffrey Goldberg's tour de force interview with President Obama on foreign policy, aptly titled "The Obama Doctrine".

Obama, unlike liberal interventionists, is an admirer of the foreign-policy realism of President George H. W. Bush and, in particular, of Bush’s national-security adviser, Brent Scowcroft (“I love that guy,” Obama once told me). Bush and Scowcroft removed Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait in 1991, and they deftly managed the disintegration of the Soviet Union; Scowcroft also, on Bush’s behalf, toasted the leaders of China shortly after the slaughter in Tiananmen Square. As Obama was writing his campaign manifesto, The Audacity of Hope, in 2006, Susan Rice, then an informal adviser, felt it necessary to remind him to include at least one line of praise for the foreign policy of President Bill Clinton, to partially balance the praise he showered on Bush and Scowcroft. 

At the outset of the Syrian uprising, in early 2011, Power argued that the rebels, drawn from the ranks of ordinary citizens, deserved America’s enthusiastic support. Others noted that the rebels were farmers and doctors and carpenters, comparing these revolutionaries to the men who won America’s war for independence. 

Obama flipped this plea on its head. “When you have a professional army,” he once told me, “that is well armed and sponsored by two large states”—Iran and Russia—“who have huge stakes in this, and they are fighting against a farmer, a carpenter, an engineer who started out as protesters and suddenly now see themselves in the midst of a civil conflict …” He paused. “The notion that we could have—in a clean way that didn’t commit U.S. military forces—changed the equation on the ground there was never true.” The message Obama telegraphed in speeches and interviews was clear: He would not end up like the second President Bush—a president who became tragically overextended in the Middle East, whose decisions filled the wards of Walter Reed with grievously wounded soldiers, who was helpless to stop the obliteration of his reputation, even when he recalibrated his policies in his second term. Obama would say privately that the first task of an American president in the post-Bush international arena was “Don’t do stupid shit.”

Obama’s reticence frustrated Power and others on his national-security team who had a preference for action. Hillary Clinton, when she was Obama’s secretary of state, argued for an early and assertive response to Assad’s violence. In 2014, after she left office, Clinton told me that “the failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad … left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled.” When The Atlantic published this statement, and also published Clinton’s assessment that “great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” Obama became “rip-shit angry,” according to one of his senior advisers. The president did not understand how “Don’t do stupid shit” could be considered a controversial slogan. Ben Rhodes recalls that “the questions we were asking in the White House were ‘Who exactly is in the stupid-shit caucus? Who is pro–stupid shit?’ ” The Iraq invasion, Obama believed, should have taught Democratic interventionists like Clinton, who had voted for its authorization, the dangers of doing stupid shit. (Clinton quickly apologized to Obama for her comments, and a Clinton spokesman announced that the two would “hug it out” on Martha’s Vineyard when they crossed paths there later.)

Syria, for Obama, represented a slope potentially as slippery as Iraq. In his first term, he came to believe that only a handful of threats in the Middle East conceivably warranted direct U.S. military intervention. These included the threat posed by al‑Qaeda; threats to the continued existence of Israel (“It would be a moral failing for me as president of the United States” not to defend Israel, he once told me); and, not unrelated to Israel’s security, the threat posed by a nuclear-armed Iran. The danger to the United States posed by the Assad regime did not rise to the level of these challenges. 

Given Obama’s reticence about intervention, the bright-red line he drew for Assad in the summer of 2012 was striking. Even his own advisers were surprised. “I didn’t know it was coming,” his secretary of defense at the time, Leon Panetta, told me. I was told that Vice President Joe Biden repeatedly warned Obama against drawing a red line on chemical weapons, fearing that it would one day have to be enforced.

It's a good piece, and as much as I would absolutely love an Obama third term, Goldberg reminds us that the president too is human and has made some pretty big mistakes as well as major victories. On the balance of the whole however, the Obama Doctrine is a major improvement over that of his predecessors, and I fear we'll learn to miss him at the helm rather early in 2017, one way or another.

But there are also some amazing shade being thrown here at both Israel and America's Arab world allies, and it's brilliant to see that Obama pegged both groups as untrustworthy and pretty awful.  It's amazing that he got as far as he did here given the truly terrible state of US foreign policy blowback.

Oh yeah, and Putin.

Flipping The Script on SCOTUS, Con't.

Meanwhile, President Obama has reportedly narrowed his SCOTUS pick down to one of three people as the game of brinksmanship gets underway in earnest.

The White House has narrowed its search for a U.S. Supreme Court nominee to three federal appeals court judges, Sri Srinivasan, Merrick Garland and Paul Watford, a source familiar with the selection process said on Friday.

Srinivasan, an Indian-American who served under presidents of both parties before President Barack Obama named him as an appellate judge, and Garland, considered but passed over for the Supreme Court twice before by Obama, are considered the leading contenders, according to the source and two other sources close to the process.

Obama is searching for a replacement for long-serving conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, who died on Feb. 13. Senate Republicans have vowed not to hold confirmation hearings or an up-or-down vote on any nominee picked by the Democratic president for the lifetime position on the court.

Senate Republicans, hoping a candidate from their party wins the Nov. 8 presidential election, want the next president, who takes office in January, to make the selection.

A formal announcement could come as soon as Monday. That would give Obama the weekend to think about his final choice and make an announcement before Tuesday's presidential primary elections in five states including Florida and Ohio.

The big takeaway here is that Jane Kelly, the Iowa judge who was supposedly being vetted a few weeks ago as a direct challenge to current Senate Judiciary Chair Iowa GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley, is not being mentioned as making this final cut.

Take that however you see it.  Kelly's name was still mentioned as being in play as recently as yesterday by the Washington Post, although that paper is reporting that the above-mentioned Sri Srivinasan is the current frontrunner.

Leading conservatives who focus on judicial nominations say that, if Srinivasan were nominated, their focus would be on his record, not his ethnicity or origins. But Curt Levey, executive director of FreedomWorks Foundation, said that, until Obama names his choice, conservatives will mainly work to bolster Senate Republicans’ argument that no nominee should be considered during the president’s final year.

To the extent that the White House weighs the nomination’s impact on the November election, Asian Americans are a small niche of voters but growing quickly. Over the past two decades, they have migrated from primarily supporting GOP presidential candidates to voting for Obama by a large majority — 73 percent — in 2012. Young Asian Americans, in particular, tend to be liberal, recent surveys have found.

For the Asian American electorate, “this is a real test to see whether they step up, if Sri Srinivasan were nominated,” said Vincent Eng, a Washington-based consultant who works on judicial nominations with Asian American organizations.

Matsuoka, of the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association, said that, no matter whom Obama selects this time, there also is “a long-range game. We know there are going to be opportunities. . . . There will be vacancies.”

“Why shouldn’t we have an [Asian American] Supreme Court justice?” said Lorna Ho Randlett, founder and co-chair of the Leader’s Forum, a business and civic leadership group for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. “If they’re qualified, and on the shortlist and ready to go, if not now, when?”

So, we'll see.

Trumpenacht

Well, just saw this happen in Dayton at the Trump rally that wasn't canceled today.




Please note you just saw a presidential candidate tell his supporters that "It's payback time, it's payback time" against those who do not support him.

Scene ends.

No Cinti For Old Trump

Donald Trump will not be holding his rally here in downtown Cincinnati tomorrow, citing (you guessed it) safety reasons.

Donald Trump is no longer planning a rally in Downtown on Sunday afternoon.

The Secret Service security supporting the GOP presidential front runner's campaign could not complete its preparation work in time to hold the event at the Duke Energy Convention Center, said Eric Deters, a local spokesman for Trump's campaign.

"Trump wants to come here, and the campaign is still looking to find a location for either Sunday or Monday," Deters said.

Another rally scheduled for Friday in Chicago was postponed because of safety concerns. Supporters and protestors clashed at a campus arena where the rally was supposed to take place.

Shame.  I would have loved to see this town tell Trump to go to hell, with students from Xavier, UC, Miami of Ohio, NKU and Cincy State leading the way.

The billionaire real estate developer is scheduled to hold a rally in Doral, Florida, on Monday night.

Trump also plans to hold rally in Cleveland on Saturday afternoon.

The campaign had reserved Duke Energy Convention Center to hold a rally from 12 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. on Sunday. City officials also said the campaign had inquired about holding a rally at Lunken Airport, but the city does not have enough parking to accommodate thousands of people at the East End airfield.

Holding a rally at Lunken would have been logistically easier for the Trump campaign, which recently held an event next to Trump's private plane at an airport hangar in Columbus.

We'll see if he still makes Dayton this afternoon.  Hell, he still may come here.  I don't buy the prep work argument at all, every venue has to be checked in advance.  There's nothing unusual about the Duke Energy Center either, it's right downtown off the 71-75 split.  Why is Dayton going ahead?

Who knows.  Trump is a master showman, in the Barnum sense.  Something about Cincy isn't right today for him.  He's a "winner" and "winners" don't cancel, especially when he needs Hamilton and Butler counties to win on Tuesday in a tight race with Kasich.

We'll see.

[UPDATE] And as soon as I get done writing this...

The rally in Cincinnati is ON. Media put out false reports that it was cancelled. Will be great - love you Ohio!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 12, 2016

Looks like he's trying to throw off the protesters. I knew it.

Last Call For The Chicago Way

Donald Trump holding a rally in Chicago went exactly as you would suspect Trump showing up at a university campus in a large Northern urban city would go.  It's what he was counting on.

A scheduled rally for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in Chicago on Friday was postponed.

A spokesperson for the GOP presidential front-runner cited safety concerns for the “tens of thousands gathered in and around” the University of Illinois-Chicago Pavillion.

This story has been updated.

The event drew thousands not only to the arena, but protests outside and inside the venue. A live stream from the scene captured Trump supporters blaming reporters for the cancellation; one woman could be heard yelling, “You should all be ashamed of yourselves.”

The activist group Voto Latino released a statement calling on demonstrators to also participate at the polls.

“The frustration felt tonight in Chicago has been felt by communities across the country. And while we should all work together and take a stand against hateful rhetoric, we must do that by rising and organizing,” said the group’s president, Maria Teresa Kumar. “We urge those protesting to channel this discontent to engage their communities, to encourage everyone to participate, register our families and friends to vote and together take a stand against hate.”

According to the Associated Press,Chicago police released a statement saying that they did not advise Trump to cancel the event, and that the department did not tell him there was a security threat at the arena.

Police spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi said the department felt it had enough officers at the scene to maintain order at the rally.

The progressive activist group MoveOn released a separate statement saying that Trump and Republican candidates supporting “hate-filled rhetoric should be on notice after tonight’s events.”

“To all of those who took to the streets of Chicago, we say thank you for standing up and saying enough is enough,” said Ilya Sherman, the group’s director of political action. “To Donald Trump, and the GOP, we say, welcome to the general election.”

Amazing stuff here, and Trump will play the victim here as much as he can.

We'll see if he gets away with it.

Trump Cards, Con't

The most awful moment of last night's GOP debate was how none of the four candidates condemned the beating of a black protester at a Trump rally in NC this week. When given the opportunity by CNN's Jake Tapper to condemn the attack, nobody had the courage to call what happened wrong, not even Trump's opponents.

"I think for every one of us, we need to show respect to the people. We need to remember who it is we're working for," said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.). "You know, we've seen for seven years a president who believes he's above the law, who behaves like an emperor, who it is all about him and he forgot that he's working for the American people. And let me — let me ask, turn the camera our here. How many of y'all feel disrespected by Washington?" 

When some audience members cheered, Cruz said confidently that "the frustration that is boiling over" came from people feeling disrespected.

Cruz blamed Obama but at no point said that the violence was wrong.

But John McGraw, the man arrested for assault in North Carolina, did not give reporters the impression of a man driven to temporarily over-reaction by big government. Interviewed by Inside Edition, he expressed no remorse. 

"Yes, he deserved it," McGraw said. "The next time we see him, we might have to kill him. We don't know who he is. He might be with a terrorist organization." 

None of Trump's rivals opted to condemn that action — or condemn Trump for anything he'd done to incite it. 

"I worry about the violence at a rally period," said Gov. John Kasich (R-Ohio). "I mean, it's — you know, elections are important but the unity of this country really matters. Jake, here's what I think is happening. There are people out there who are worried about their jobs."

Kasich blamed Obama and unemployment.  He's worried, but that's as far as he's willing to go.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) ran even further away from the context, opting — like Trump — to immediately change the subject from vigilante violence at a rally to how law enforcement officers "deserve our respect" every day. 

"On the issue of anger: Yes, people are angry," said Rubio. "Of course they're angry. Every institution in America has been failing us for the better part of 20 years or 30 years." 

The "violence" round of the debate was in sync with the rest of the night, as candidates passed on chance after chance to criticize Trump. (Cruz was often the exception, but he said little that was not recycled from stump speeches.) The debate ended with none of Trump's rivals criticizing him for incitement, or for expressly criticizing the violence that had swallowed a day of news — and more directly, injured a peaceful protester.

Nobody on that stage gave a damn about a black man getting his face punched in for the crime of being a black man at a Trump rally.  Nobody who supports these monsters cares,  Nobody who enables these monsters cares. Nobody who created these monsters cares.

Here's Trump's response this morning to the assault:

Let me just tell you, we’ve had some violent people as protestors. You know, they are not just people saying, ‘Oh’ — these are people that punch. These are people that are violent people. I get the biggest crowds, by far, not even a contest and — you know, you people don’t like to report it, but actually the one thing good about protestors is you have to go and go into these stadiums, these massive stadiums with 25,000 and 30,000 people and you have to — [indecipherable] because the cameras never turn. I bet the cameras never, ever turn and show the stadium. I always say turn and show the — they don’t. But when is a protestors up in the corner it’s great, because the camera is all there [indecipherable]. Because, you know it’s a negative as opposed to a positive so they turn.

But we’ve had a couple that were really violent. And the particular one when I said, like to bang him. That was — a very vicious — you know, he is a guy who was swinging very loud and then started swinging at the audience. And you know what? The audience swung back. And I thought it was very, very appropriate. He was swinging, he was hitting people and the audience hit back. And that’s what we need a little bit more of. Now, I’m not talking about just a protesters. This was a guy who was — should not have been allowed to do what he did. And frankly, if you want to know the truth, the police were very, very restrained. The police have been amazing. But the police were very, very restrained.”

What rough beast, indeed.

Land Of The Rising Core Temperature: Five Years Later

As I mentioned this morning, today is the anniversary of the Fukushima disaster in Japan, which resulted in tens of thousands dead, tens of thousands more displaced, and a nuclear plant meltdown that will continue to cause detrimental environmental effects for generations.

Reactor number one at Fukushima Daiichi is still so hot that five years later, robots still can't enter.

The robots sent in to find highly radioactive fuel at Fukushima's nuclear reactors have “died”; a subterranean "ice wall" around the crippled plant meant to stop groundwater from becoming contaminated has yet to be finished. And authorities still don’t know how to dispose of highly radioactive water stored in an ever mounting number of tanks around the site. 

Five years ago, one of the worst earthquakes in history triggered a 10-meter high tsunami that crashed into the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station causing multiple meltdowns. Nearly 19,000 people were killed or left missing and 160,000 lost their homes and livelihoods in the quake and tsunami. 

Today, the radiation at the Fukushima plant is still so powerful it has proven impossible to get into its bowels to find and remove the extremely dangerous blobs of melted fuel rods, weighing hundreds of tonnes. Five robots sent into the reactors have failed to return. 

The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco)  has made some progress, such as removing hundreds of spent fuel roads in one damaged building. But the technology needed to establish the location of the melted fuel rods in the other three reactors at the plant has not been developed. 

“It is extremely difficult to access the inside of the nuclear plant," Naohiro Masuda, Tepco's head of decommissioning said in an interview. "The biggest obstacle is the radiation.” 

The fuel rods melted through their containment vessels in the reactors, and no one knows exactly where they are now. This part of the plant is so dangerous to humans, Tepco has been developing robots, which can swim under water and negotiate obstacles in damaged tunnels and piping to search for the melted fuel rods. 

But as soon as they get close to the reactors, the radiation destroys their wiring and renders them useless, causing long delays, Masuda said. 

Each robot has to be custom-built for each building.“It takes two years to develop a single-function robot,” Masuda said.

And so the cleanup will continue, probably for the rest of the lives of the people there working to decontaminate the site now.  It's a massive environmental disaster that should have been the end, worldwide, of nuclear power technology.  It's not.  And there are hundreds more potential Fukushima meltdowns waiting to happen.  We do this to ourselves and see the results, and we still do it.

We only get one planet, and we've killed it multiple times over.

StupidiNews!

• New Mexico police are searching for two convicts who escaped from a prison transport van last night near the town of Artesia.
• Japan is marking the five-year anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami that killed more than 18,000 and caused the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor meltdown.
• A defector from Islamic State has delivered a flash drive with information on tens of thousands of supporters in 50 countries to a Sky News journalist in Britain.
• The founder of Russia Today news service who was found dead in a Washington DC hotel room last year was killed by blunt force trauma to the head, according to medical examiners.
• Nearly half of Americans surveyed mistakenly believe the Zika virus is fatal, rather than causing birth defects in children.

Last Call For Berned Notice

Some important points here by Washington Post reporter Janell Ross on the anti-Obama purity caucus folks that have attached themselves to the Sanders movement and how they are hurting him among voters of color.

Something -- we cannot say what -- inside certain corners of the ostensibly progressive and overwhelmingly white ranks of Sanders voters is amiss. There is a pattern -- demonstrated time and time again -- by both Sanders and some Sanders supporters of racial cluelessness, an infantilizing and almost colonial kind of condescension about policy, and a tendency to react to anyone who points that out by, well, supplying even more evidence of racial tone-deafness, self-ordained intellectual superiority and sometimes completely open displays of various forms of outright bigotry. 

That's right. We said it. In trying to make their case, Sanders, and far more often some subset of his supporters, behave in ways that are difficult to square with their claims to progressive politics and building a more inclusive and egalitarian society. 

One final note before we get to a few examples of the behavior characterized above: The portion of Sanders supporters who read the paragraphs above and began to compose their tweets, emails and below-story comments, we are aware of that Intercept piece that argues that the "Berniebro" and his alleged public misbehavior is media-generated fiction. 

But the emails, Twitter messages and comments I have received tell a different story. They use a variety of curse words and insults typically reserved for women. More than one has suggested that I deserve to become the victim of a sex crime. They critique the "objectivity" of what is clearly political analysis based on polling data and other facts; they insist that black voters are dumb or that I have a personal obligation to help black voters see the error of their Clinton-voting ways. It is vile. And it stands in sharp contrast to the claim that no portion of Sanders supporters are angry people who sometimes engage in or embrace bigotry. 

We could print the emails. But those of you who sent them know who you are and the horrendous things said. We doubt that this would do much for your progressive street cred.

And it's important here to note that this kind of thing was happening long before Bernie's 2016 run and that it's not endemic to him, and it's what has bothered me about the "progressive" movement in America for a long time.

There's a group of mostly white progressives who really do have awful misconceptions about black and Latino Democrats in this country, that we're stupid and will pull the lever for any D no matter how vile, that we're not really liberal at all, that we're anti-LGBT bigots who despise atheists, and that we're really the unwashed masses in the Democratic party and have to have a white liberal savior to lead us, who knows better.

None of that is true, but the people who perpetuate the monolith of the dumb black voter who needs the smart white guy to organize them got a nasty wake-up call in 2008 when Obama came along. They've hated him ever since.  Clinton was acceptable to them in 2008.  Now it's Bernie.  These folks were obnoxious eight years ago and even more annoying now.

So yes, there are racist assholes on the left, the folks searching for the new Great White Hope and while the vast majority are hanging out with Trump and friends, some are in Bernie's camp (and a few Hillary fans to boot).

This does happen, and it's good to be reminded of the damage they can cause.  Look no further than the obscene, punishing response to this article.

Meanwhile, In Trump's America...

We're not too far off now from the pogroms and purges if this is any indication of what's to come from the Trumpian States of the Confederacy.

Multiple videos show a protester at a Donald Trump rally in North Carolina being sucker-punched by a Trump supporter. 

The videos, which appeared on social media early Thursday and are shot from different perspectives, show an African American with long hair wearing a white T-shirt leaving the Trump rally as the audience boos. He is being led out of the rally by men in uniforms that read “Sheriff’s Office.” The man extends a middle finger to the audience on his way out. 

Then, out of nowhere, the man is punched in the face by a pony-tailed man, who appears to be white, in a cowboy hat, black vest and pink shirt as the crowd begins to cheer. The protester stumbles away, and then is detained by a number of the men in uniforms, who handcuff him while he is on the ground. 

“Chill, chill!” an onlooker says. “You don’t gotta grab him like that!”

This is what actual fascism looks like.  I know I keep saying that when it comes to videos of people daring to protest Herr Drumpf and then getting clocked in the head by his supporters while getting dragged off by the cops, but it keeps happening at a rather depressing rate.

Someone is going to be hurt or killed at this rate.  Who among us will vote for The Donald just to make the wolves go bother someone else's door?

Seriously though, the cops didn't stop the guy, the onlookers didn't either, this man got the crap stomped out of him, and you wonder why maybe, just maybe I'm willing to overlook Bernie's problem or Clinton problems to keep Trump out of the White House?

This is why.  A stadium full of people who wish anyone who looks like me bodily harm for no other reason than I'm black? The same for our Muslim, Latino, and LGBTQ friends and loved ones? Giving them political power by igniting their hatred?

No matter how you feel about Bernie or Hillary, I'll take them in a heartbeat over Trump and this is why.

Looking Way Down The Road

It's not entirely out of line to speculate on the Veepstakes for a Clinton ticket, and a whole lot of names are getting thrown around: Bernie Sanders, Liz Warren, Julian Castro.  Tommy Christopher puts forth an obvious (but not obvious) alternative:.

There is, however, one pick who checks off every box for Hillary Clinton, who matches her strengths without hurting the ticket in other ways, who gives her the opportunity to groom a successor, who delivers broad support both from the Democratic base and independents, and who won’t fold in a debate with the Republican VP candidate. Hillary Clinton should pick Joe Biden as her running mate, for a single term as vice president. 

Biden has the chops, the name ID, and a reservoir of goodwill among Democrats, Obama coalition voters, and the working-class white voters that Donald Trump is attracting, plus the toughness to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Hillary, and toe-to-toe with the Republicans. Unlike a lesser-known pick, there will be no surprises with Joe Biden, and his free-wheeling style is a perfect counter-punch to the Trump phenomenon that would also afford Hillary the luxury of remaining a few feet above the fray. 

A third Biden term would also give the deep Democratic bench time to come into focus, and perhaps shore up thin credentials like Castro’s. 

Hillary Clinton’s greatest asset in this general election will be her toughness, and that’s an asset she can’t afford to have diluted by a weak running mate. Joe Biden is the rare pick that can match her toughness without overshadowing her, and whose unique resumé makes him something of a Rosetta Stone for huge groups of voters. 

Then, after he’s served his four years, and helped shepherd the confirmation of Chief Justice Barack Obama, Biden can make way for the next VP pick when Hillary runs for her second term.

I certainly wouldn't mind Biden, but the major, major problem with Biden is that it puts two white Democrats on the same ticket in the post-Obama era.  That's something that might be an issue. Biden making way for Castro in 2020 would go a long way, but I'm not sure Biden's going to be a ton of help in getting the votes that Hillary would have trouble getting in 2016.

Yes, it would be a major reinforcement of keeping President Obama's policies, absolutely.  But that's what Hillary should be running on anyway.

I respect Tommy's argument and it does make sense on paper, Biden as the foil to Trump, and let's face it, it's not like Republicans have been making good Veep choices lately.  Biden for a single term might not be a terrible idea, but I don't know if he really wants it.

We'll see.

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