Your daily dose of BNR Letters to the Editor, new graphics courtesy of LoneStarMike, article roundup by Don midwest, and Wisconsin VOTING INFORMATION via Jalus!

None of whom are me. I'm just the messenger.

Enjoy!

Posted by Jalus

Wisconsin it’s your time to shine today! Make it six wins in a row.

• You vote TODAY: TUESDAY, April 5th.
• Any Wisconsinite can vote for Bernie.
• Wisconsin has SAME-DAY registration. You can also register at YOUR POLLING Place on election day by bringing proof of residency.
• REMINDER: This is the first election when you have to show PHOTO ID to Vote. Learn more at: Bringit.wi.gov
• College students can vote using their campus address.
• Polls are open 7 AM — 8 PM

  WE can do this!

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  Posted by LoneStarMike

  Wow — there’s enough info in today’s BNR to fill a magazine!

  Current Facebook stats as of 5:00 a.m. CST

  Bernie2016/Hillary2016/Senator Bernie Sanders

  Bernie Sanders 3,761,360 Presidential Campaign Page

  Hillary Clinton 3,110,888 Presidential Campaign Page

  Bernie Sanders 3,676,176 U. S. Senatorial Page

  Tuesday, Bernie had 646,305 more likes than Sec. Clinton

  Today, Bernie has 650,472 more likes than Sec. Clinton

  (The gap widens and it’s the highest it’s ever been)

  It will be interesting to see what the numbers are tomorrow — especially if he wins big. I hope a big win today in Wisconsin will also generate some more $$ for Bernie.

  I only had time to make four new graphics yesterday, because one of them took a long time. Here's that one:

  

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  Superdelegates should honor state voters, support Sanders

  Portland Press Herald LTE — Portland, Maine

  Maine will be sending five superdelegates to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia this July, in addition to the 25 pledged delegates allotted to the state of Maine.

  Because Bernie Sanders won the Maine caucuses by 64.3 percent, to Hillary Clinton’s 35.5 percent, he has 16 of those 25 delegates pledged to vote for him, and she has nine of those delegates pledged to vote for her. The five superdelegates, however, are free to vote for whomever they please, regardless of how the people of Maine voted.

  One of the superdelegates, Phil Bartlett of Gorham, has said he will wait until after the primaries to decide who to vote for. Troy Jackson of Allagash has said he will vote for Sanders. The other three – Chellie Pingree, Maggie Allen of Madison and Peggy Schaffer of Vassalboro – initially said they would vote for Clinton; now they say they will support whichever candidate gets the most pledged delegates nationally.

  I believe that Maine’s superdelegates should vote as Maine voted, not as Mississippi or any other state voted. These three people have a duty to reflect the wishes of Maine voters only – to do anything else would be profoundly disrespectful and undemocratic. Mainers turned out in record numbers this year and waited in very long lines to vote, so the superdelegate votes must honor ours.

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  We need a “real” Family Values Candidate

  

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  Here's why I'm voting for Bernie Sanders

  The Cap Times — Madison, Wisconsin (last half of column)

  [Bob] La Follette, as political historians often recount, did swim against the current, proposing ideas and concepts that only the most loyal believed were possible. So it is with Bernie Sanders, who firmly believes that America can have universal health care, extend free public education through our young people's college years, and get the wealthy in America to pay their fair share of the tax burden — no, not soak them, but get them to pay the taxes they should be paying.

  None of these ideas will ever come to fruition and create a fair and just America unless a Bernie Sanders is willing to make the case for them and show voters how it can be done. Yes, it's uphill and perhaps with today's politicians, it's tilting at windmills.

  But Bernie Sanders is showing that millions of people are with him to change the way our government does business.

  The message he is sending is a giant first step to getting those changes made. That's why tomorrow I'm voting for him.

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  Superdelegates should switch

  The Spokesman Review LTE — Spokane, Washington

  This weekend I participated in a Democratic Party presidential caucus for the first time in my life. I proudly voted for Bernie Sanders, and, in fact, so did Spokane, so did Washington state, overwhelmingly.

  Every single county across Washington state voted for Bernie Sanders. The final results were 73 percent of delegates for Bernie, 27 percent for Hillary Clinton.

  The Democratic Party, however, follows the fundamentally undemocratic practice of allowing approximately 15 percent of all delegates to be awarded by elected officials, party leaders and, literally, lobbyists – not the voting public. Washington state has 17 superdelegates and nine of them committed their vote to Hillary Clinton before the voters in Washington state had even caucused.

  The job of these representatives is to represent the interests and views of their constituents who voted them into office. With the overwhelming caucus results in favor of Bernie Sanders, every single superdelegate that has committed to Clinton is greatly misrepresenting the desire of their voting districts.

  We voters determine the re-election chances of our representatives, so I urge the following superdelegates to switch their delegate vote to Bernie Sanders: Jay Inslee, Patty Murray, Maria Cantwell, Suzan DelBene, Denny Heck, Derek Kilmer, Rick Larsen, Jim McDermott and Adam Smith.

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  And since I’m from Austin, I had to do a special car graphic with our own skyline just for us.

  

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  Posted by Don Midwest

  How Hillary Clinton Bought the Loyalty of 33 State Democratic Parties

  Collusion between the Clinton campaign and the DNC allowed Hillary Clinton to buy the loyalty of 33 state Democratic parties last summer. Montana was one of those states. It sold itself for $64,100.

  The Super Delegates now defying democracy with their insistent refusal to change their votes to Sanders in spite of a handful of overwhelming Clinton primary losses in their own states, were arguably part of that deal.

  In August 2015, at the Democratic Party convention in Minneapolis, 33 democratic state parties made deals with the Hillary Clinton campaign and a joint fundraising entity called The Hillary Victory Fund. The deal allowed many of her core billionaire and inner circle individual donors to run the maximum amounts of money allowed through those state parties to the Hillary Victory Fund in New York and the DNC in Washington.

  The idea was to increase how much one could personally donate to Hillary by taking advantage of the Supreme Court ruling 2014, McCutcheon v FEC, that knocked down a cap on aggregate limits as to how much a donor could give to a federal campaign in a year. It thus eliminated the ceiling on amounts spent by a single donor to a presidential candidate.

  and more details how the party did its deed

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  Muslim Americans a force on campaign trail

  Led by a New Generation, Muslim Americans Are Making Their Presence Felt in the Presidential Campaign: Voting as a bloc for the first time in over a decade, Muslims have shifted their support to Democrats.

  There is an effort at alternet called The Grey Zone Project. The Zionists and ISIS and others want a black and white world where there isn’t a grey zone where Muslims and others work together. In other words, they want to make the gap between people stark and continue the attacks on Muslims and the encouragement of violence on both sides.

  These days with terrorism being billed by some as the new cold war, Muslims are attacked physically and politically. The Muslim community in the USA is getting organized.

  GRAYZONE PROJECT
  Led by a New Generation, Muslim Americans Are Making Their Presence Felt in the Presidential Campaign
  Voting as a bloc for the first time in over a decade, Muslims have shifted their support to Democrats.
  By Saif Alnuweiri / AlterNet
  April 3, 2016

  The political future of the American Muslim vote seems anchored in the Democratic Party after years of enduring Islamophobia and bigotry from the Republican Party. This year’s election cycle marked the return of American Muslims to national politics after more than a decade of political dormancy. In many ways it has already exceeded the political participation of the 2000 elections, when Muslims formed a sought after voting bloc in support of the Republican, George W. Bush. Led by a new generation that came of age after 9/11, Muslims have shifted their support to the Democratic presidential candidates seeking the outsized voting power of political minorities to help defeat an increasingly white, male and overwhelmingly evangelical Christian Republican party. It’s not difficult to see what has accounted for this change. The Republican Party has pushed out almost any support it once had among Muslims. Whereas 50,000 Muslims helped deliver George W. Bush enough votes to contest the Florida election results in 2000. As Sami Al-Arian explained for Alternet, Muslims mobilized after Bush promised to end the practice of secret evidence, a pledge he reneged on after 9/11. Today’s Muslim voters are overwhelmingly Democratic, and increasingly leaning towards Bernie Sanders. Along with outright Republican hostility, the changing nature of the national debate over race and the increasing diversification of younger generations of Americans have emboldened American Muslims to be more vocal in their politics and engage with it at a grassroots level.

  And Muslim voters are leaning toward Bernie

  “A lot of people I talked to about Bernie Sanders, they would say, Bernie who?’” said Ahmed Bedier, founder of United Voices for America, a non-profit, and of the Facebook group Muslim Americans for Bernie Sanders. Bedier has helped with the Sanders campaign in his personal capacity, so as not to violate the political neutrality of UVA. “It wasn’t until May or June that I started paying attention to his message, which is a lot of the things I was working for, that we need a political revolution, that we need more people in the political process, more diversity in government.”

  Political organizers like Bedier support Sanders for more reasons than his defense of Muslims. They too share the notion that the economic and political system is rigged to benefit the top 1 percent of society, and they have been motivated by the belief that two or more seemingly unrelated sociopolitical issues exist because they originate from many of the same systemic problems

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  Heard again war in Afghanistan over immediately

  But the politicians wanted blood so they drew the Taliban back into the fight

  I don’t have the link to the first piece that mentioned this — how with the first American strike left cars a melted twisted mess and top Afghanistan Taliban leaders told their supporters to go home and hide out in the village, the game was over.

  The story today from a ranger there who was at a Trump rally and caused a reaction

  “What I didn’t know as I entered [Afghanistan] with the 2nd Army Ranger Battalion was that the Taliban had essentially surrendered after the initial assault by the Air Force and the special forces,” Fanning said of his first tour, which started in late 2001. “Our job was essentially to draw the Taliban back into the fight. Surrender wasn’t good enough for politicians after 9/11. We wanted blood. We wanted a head count. It really didn’t matter who it was. So we’d walk up to people, people who had been occupied ... , involved in civil war before that, with tons of money at our disposal. We’d said, ‘Hey, we will give you this amount of money if you point out a member of the Taliban.’ An Afghan would say, ‘Sure, absolutely. There’s a member right there.’ So we go next door. We’d land in their neighbor’s front yard, put a bag over every military-aged person’s head, whether they were a member of the Taliban or not, give the person who identified that person money. Then that person would also get that neighbor’s property. In a country with as much desperation and poverty as Afghanistan you’d do anything to put money or food on your family’s table. Essentially that’s what we were doing. But we were also bringing people who had absolutely no stake in the fight into the war. We were creating enemies.

  This is an article by noted war reporter Chris Hedges. Krugman said that Chris’ book “War if a Force that Gives Us Meaning” is the best book he had read about war.

  Our corporate media celebrates “heroes” which is a cover for soldiers to not talk about what happened. And Americans go to endless special effects movies of death and destruction, but the actual acts we do are deemed are hidden by the corporate media.

  “Probably about 50 percent or more of the intel that we got was just dead wrong,” he went on. “Busting in these doors you come into a family’s house and there’s elderly women, young little girls, 3, 4 years old, just screaming and horrific, just terrified to where they literally soil themselves. They pee their pants. You’re taking Grandma and throwing her up against the wall and interrogating her. That hits you right here. It hits you really hard. I began to ask myself, what the hell am I doing? If you happen to be a young man [in a raided home], in your early 20s or anywhere in that range where you can carry a weapon, then by mere association of being a young male, a possible insurgent, [Fedayeen Saddam] loyalist, whatever the case may be, you were taken out of the home to be interrogated. Who knows what happened to them. ... I know [Marines] were there all night interrogating them. Who knows if they even made it back to their family.

  Early in the war in Iraq, I recall a video shown by Michael Moore where a walled house was invaded by a tank to knock down the walls and get to the family. This article is mostly about Afghanistan, but same kind of stuff is going down.

  Now we have “precision strikes”

  “With the drone attacks you have a range, an outside range, where so many civilians are being killed,” Hanes said. “It’s a terrorist-producing factory. If you lose your child, if you lose your mother, any of your family members to this … we have to think about that. Put yourself in that position. If I lost my child I would be desperate. What would you do? It’s easy to understand why someone would strap a bomb to themselves and blow themselves up.”

  As noted forever, what happens in foreign wars comes home and Trump fans the flames.

  The physical brutality and violence are accompanied by the overt racism that is characteristic of military occupations.

  “We didn’t refer to the people in Afghanistan as Afghans, they’re hajji,” Fanning said. “This is a term of respect for someone who’s gone to make the trip to Mecca, but we’d use it in a derogatory term.”

  “The terms ‘sand nigger,’ ‘hajji,’ ‘barbarian,’ ‘terrorist,’ all of these things were thrown around as if the people there were subhuman,” Hanes added.

  Who tells lies?

  The lies of the state and the wider society became painfully apparent.

  “We’re sold the idea of—we’re going to liberate people, we’re fighting terrorism. Then we realize we’re the ones terrorizing people,” Hanes said. “That torments you psychologically. I’ve lost a few friends to suicide.”

  The Lie of Patriotism