and the Evening Blues are just awesome--jam--packed full of excellent material. Love it! Thank you, el

and everyone. Happy Monday. Thank you for the open thread, el.

NYTimes' coverage of Bernie's rally in Prospect Park. In the Politics section this morning. No pictures of rally, but a picture of Clinton on the subway from earlier this month.

The battle for Brooklyn between Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is intense, and Mrs. Clinton is counting on her deep support in the borough’s African-American neighborhoods to offset Mr. Sanders’s popularity among white liberals. At a block party in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section on Sunday, she was praised by Representative James E. Clyburn, a civil-rights leader who traveled from his home state, South Carolina, for the occasion.
…

The former secretary of state is comfortably ahead in the polls here, and she seems to be enjoying hopscotching around the state she represented for eight years in the Senate.

But for all the warmhearted reminiscences, Mrs. Clinton has something to fear from Mr. Sanders on Tuesday. Around the time she visited Bedford-Stuyvesant, thousands gathered for a rally for Mr. Sanders in Prospect Park, the pristine patch of green wedged between lower-income Crown Heights and upscale Park Slope. The actor Danny DeVito led the cheerful crowd in chants of “Bernie! Bernie!” and someone handed out copies of a fake newspaper with a banner headline reading “A Vote for Hillary Clinton Is a Vote for Donald Trump.”

The Sanders campaign said the crowd reached 28,300, a record for its rallies.
…

Mr. Sanders will hold a rally at Hunter’s Point South Park in Queens on Monday evening, for which doors open at 5 p.m. And Mrs. Clinton will address one of her core constituencies — women — at the New York Hilton Midtown. Doors open at noon.

Just a quick reminder - the thread for this weeks photography assignment is up and already has some contributions. The assignment is Black and white outdoor flowers and or plants. All contributions welcome!

http://caucus99percent.com/content/weekly-photography-assignment

And an august cast of characters for ABCDE? If I had picked a boy-pup, his name was designated Flynn, In Like Flynn, referring to the penile element I think. Very naughty, lost in time.

I picked a girl-pup instead. Just for a change-up from boy-dogs. Squat, not leg-lifting.

It is a beautiful day here in western NC. We took the dogs for a walk this morning and it was very chilly to start and almost hot by the time we finished.

At our Peace vigil on Saturday, we had two teenage skateboarders stop by. Both boys were sixteen, too young to vote, but they saw Don's Bernie pin on his hat and said that if they could vote, they would be voting for Bernie. They also asked if they could hold one of our signs. We were just about ready to pack up, but I handed my sign to one of them for a few minutes. Earlier we had several young girls walk by and they all said "Go Bernie!" as they passed. I asked the boys how they knew about Bernie and they said they read about him on the internet. One boy said that he was very interested in politics and tried to read as much as he could. If Bernie does not win this time, it will probably be the last gasp for the establishment. These kids are smart and they want big changes. They know that they are getting screwed. It does my heart good to see kids like this.

rarely acknowledged positives of the Soviet period is that during it the Russian Orthodox Church was told to shut up and sit in the corner. Now it is back, and, again, completely out of control.

April 18 is also the birthday of actor Eric Roberts, who for several years snorted most of the cocaine to come out of Bolivia.

18 —> a 1 and an 8 —> the 1st and 8th letters of the alphabet

a great article by Erica Garner from Common Dreams at TOP.
I Feel a Political Revolution Coming.

I think Don Midwest made a great comment in the thread of this diary, which links to another article in Common Dreams.
Would Hillary Overthrow a Government Run by Bernie?
by Les Leopold
Oh, quite damning of Hillary Clinton's involvements back in the days.

I can't figure out how to pull up just a single comment on TOP and link to it, so I have to copy it here in its entirety.

Don midwest Apr 18 · 10:51:41 AM
Would Hillary Overthrow a Government Run by Bernie?

I was kicked out of the Peace Corps for several reasons including profound language difficulties and leading a revolt in the training group. In 1967 I had a MA in Math from Berkeley and was in a revolting mood. At the time there were more Peace Corps volunteers in Chile than any other country in the world and the US government was trying to sway the election so that Allende would not be elected. He was elected and a US sponsored coup killed him and led to decades of oppression. Henry Kissinger, one of Hillary’s friends and advisers and vacation couple, was linked to the coup in Chile, among other places.

This article is a thought piece. Bernie’s democratic socialism policies are aligned with positions that have led to US linked coups in Latin America, so as an exercise in thinking, would Hillary overthrow a government run by someone with the policies of Bernie? Short answer, sure she would.

Lots of details in the well written article.

Let’s try a thought experiment.

Imagine for a moment that a Bernie-like leader was elected the president of a Latin American country and that the U.S. feared he would adopt policies that were hostile to American corporate interests. Further imagine that Hillary became the president of the U.S. Would she consider supporting a coup against Bernie?

We know what this Bernie-like president would likely do. He would want to break up the largest banks and begin to replace them with public banks. He would call to renegotiate foreign debt, especially with American creditors. In addition, he would increase labor rights in ways that might threaten American business interests. Also he might extend diplomatic ties with Cuba, China and Iran, contrary to the wishes of the U.S.

In short, his policies would be reminiscent of those put forth by Salvador Allende, the socialist Chilean president who was undermined by covert American operations even before he was elected in 1970. By 1973, the U.S. had created the conditions that led to the violent overthrow of the democratically elected government by General Pinochet, who proceeded to kill thousands of Chileans....

article continues and much more detail there

So Would Hillary Support a Coup to Oust a Sanders-like Presidency in Latin America?

While our thought experiment may at first appear ludicrous, the people of Honduras might not think it so. Under Hillary Clinton’s leadership as Secretary of State, the U.S. gave support to the Honduras military which ousted yet another democratically elected president. Here’s Dana Frank’s description in the New York Times on January 26, 2012.

“Ever since the June 28, 2009, coup that deposed Honduras’s democratically elected president, José Manuel Zelaya, the country has been descending deeper into a human rights and security abyss. That abyss is in good part the State Department’s making....
This chain of events — a coup that the United States didn’t stop, a fraudulent election that it accepted — has now allowed corruption to mushroom. The judicial system hardly functions. Impunity reigns. At least 34 members of the opposition have disappeared or been killed, and more than 300 people have been killed by state security forces since the coup, according to the leading human rights organization Cofadeh. At least 13 journalists have been killed since Mr. Lobo took office, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists....

Why has the State Department thrown itself behind the Lobo administration despite brutal evidence of the regime’s corruption? In part because it has caved in to the Cuban-American constituency of Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Republican chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and her allies. They have been ferocious about Honduras as a first domino with which to push back against the line of center-left and leftist governments that have won elections in Latin America in the past 15 years. With its American air base, Honduras is also crucial to the United States’ military strategy in Latin America.”

The Honduras story evokes some similarties ... outside of Latin America, no? I think. But what do I know. Just my guts making some noise in my mind. Sorry, if that is all known stuff to you, to me that's all something I learn along the way in recent months. And I am a slow learner and a fast "forgetter".